"They took her from me, too," he said in a low, hard voice. "She was Arnold de Curboil's daughter--when he married my mother he made his child my sister. You know the Church's law!" Eleanor was on the point of saying something impulsively, but her eyelids suddenly drooped and she checked herself. If Gilbert Warde did not know that the Church granted dispensations in such cases, she saw no good reason for telling him. "Besides," he added, "I could not have her now, unless I could take her from her father by force." "No," said the Queen, thoughtfully. "Is she fair?" "Very dark," said Gilbert. "I meant, is she beautiful?" "To me, yes: the most beautiful in the world. But how should I know? I have never heard others speak of her; she is not beautiful as your Grace is,--not radiantly, supremely, magnificently perfect,--yet to my eyes she is very lovely." "I should like to see her," said the Queen. In the silence that followed they began to walk up and down again side by side, but Eleanor's hand no longer rested on Gilbert's arm. She could see that his eyes were fixed upon a face that was far away, and that his hand longed for a touch not hers; and a painful little thrill of disappointment ran through her, for she was not used to any sort of opposition, in great things or small. The handsome Englishman attracted her strangely, and not by his outward personality only. From the first a sort of mystery had hung over him, and she had felt, when she was with him, the inexplicable fascination of a curiosity which she should be sure to satisfy sooner or later. And now, having learned something of his life, and liking him the more for what she knew, she was suddenly filled with an irresistible longing to see the girl who had made the first mark on Gilbert's life. She tried to conjure up the young face, and the dark hue he had spoken of brought the vision of a fateful shadow. Her mind dwelt upon the girl, and she started visibly when Gilbert spoke to her. "And has your Grace no deed for me to do?" he asked. "Is there nothing whereby I may prove my thanks?" "Nothing, save that you be indeed my friend--a friend I can trust, a friend to whom I may speak safely as to my own soul, a friend whom I may tell how heartily I hate this life I lead!" She uttered the last words with a sudden rising accent of unruly discontent, as genuine as every other outward showing of her vital nature. "How can your life be hateful?" asked Gilbert, in profound astonishment, for he did not know her half as well as she already knew him. "How can it be anything else?" she asked, "How should life not be hateful, when every natural thing that makes life worth living is choked as soon as it is awake? Oh, I often wish I were a man!" "Men do not wish you were," answered Gilbert, with a smile.