Indeed she
found them strangely complicated, and as difficult to control as to
understand, while she stood gazing on the youth who through her
found himself helpless and wounded in the hands of his enemies. He
was all in the wrong, no doubt--a rebel against his king, and an
apostate from the church of his country; but he was the same Richard
with whom she had played all her childhood, whom her mother had
loved, and between whom and herself had never fallen shadow before
that cast by the sudden outblaze of the star of childish preference
into the sun of youthful love. And was it not when the very mother
of shadows, the blackness of darkness itself, swept between them and
separated them for ever, that first she knew how much she had loved
him? What if not with the love that could listen entranced to its
own echo!--love of child or love of maiden, Dorothy never asked
herself which it had been, or which it was now. She was not given to
self-dissection. The cruel fingers of analysis had never pulled her
flower to pieces, had never rubbed the bloom from the sun-dyed glow
of her feelings.
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