She was so strangely kind through the poor victim's swoons and weeping that the very menials who were called to aid her went back to their hall wondering in their talk of the noble grandness of so great a lady, who on the very brink of her own joy could stoop to protect and comfort a creature so far beneath her, that to most ladies her sorrow and desertion would have been things which were too trivial to count; for 'twas guessed, and talked over with great freedom and much shrewdness, that this was a country victim of Sir John Oxon's, and he having deserted his creditors, was ready enough to desert his rustic beauty, finding her heavy on his hands. Below stairs the men closing the entrance to the passage with brick, having caught snatches of the servants' gossip, talked of what they heard among themselves as they did their work. "Ay, a noble lady indeed," they said. "For 'tis not a woman's way to be kindly with the cast-off fancy of a man, even when she does not want him herself. He was her own worshipper for many a day, Sir John; and before she took the old earl 'twas said that for a space people believed she loved him. She was but fifteen and a high mettled beauty; and he as handsome as she, and had a blue eye that would melt any woman--but at sixteen he was a town rake, and such tricks as this one he hath played since he was a lad. 'Tis well indeed for this poor thing her ladyship hath seen her. She hath promised to protect her, and sends her down to Dunstanwolde with her mother this very week. Would all fine ladies were of her kind. To hear such things of her puts a man in the humour to do her work well." CHAPTER XX--A noble marriage When the duke came back from France, and to pay his first eager visit to his bride that was to be, her ladyship's lacqueys led him not to the Panelled Parlour, but to a room which he had not entered before, it being one she had had the fancy to have remodelled and made into a beautiful closet for herself, her great wealth rendering it possible for her to accomplish changes without the loss of time the owners of limited purses are subjected to in the carrying out of plans. This room she had made as unlike the Panelled Parlour as two rooms would be unlike one another. Its panellings were white, its furnishings were bright and delicate, its draperies flowered with rosebuds tied in clusters with love-knots of pink and blue; it had a large bow-window, through which the sunlight streamed, and it was blooming with great rose-bowls overrunning with sweetness. From a seat in the morning sunshine among the flowers and plants in the bow-window, there rose a tall figure in a snow-white robe--a figure like that of a beautiful stately girl who was half an angel. It was my lady, who came to him with blushing cheeks and radiant shining eyes, and was swept into his arms in such a passion of love and blessed tenderness as Heaven might have smiled to see.