He was too high and fine in all his thoughts to say to himself that in her he saw for the first time the woman who was his peer; but this was very truth--or might have been, if Fate had set her youth elsewhere, and a lady who was noble and her own mother had trained and guarded her.

When he saw her at the Court surrounded, as she ever was, by a court of her own; when he saw her reigning in her lord's house, receiving and doing gracious honour to his guests and hers; when she passed him in her coach, drawing every eye by the majesty of her presence, as she drove through the town, he felt a deep pang, which was all the greater that his honour bade him conquer it.
He had no ignoble thought of her, he would have scorned to sully his soul with any light passion; to him she was the woman who might have been his beloved wife and duchess, who would have upheld with him the honour and traditions of his house, whose strength and power and beauty would have been handed down to his children, who so would have been born endowed with gifts befitting the state to which Heaven had called them.

It was of this he thought when he saw her, and of naught less like to do her honour.

And as he had marked her so, he saw in her eyes, despite her dignity and grace, she had marked him.

He did not know how closely, or that she gave him the attention he could not restrain himself from bestowing upon her.