After Elizabeth--ever self-willed--had declared her way about the marriage ceremony, looking for no reply save that of silent obedience, she made Angèle sit at her feet and tell her whole story again from first to last. They were alone, and Elizabeth showed to this young refugee more of her own heart than any other woman had ever seen. Not by words alone, for she made no long story; but once she stooped and kissed Angèle upon the cheek, and once her eyes filled up with tears, and they dropped upon her lap unheeded. All the devotion shown herself as a woman had come to naught; and it may be that this thought stirred in her now. She remembered how Leicester and herself had parted, and how she was denied all those soft resources of regret which were the right of the meanest women in her realm. For, whatever she might say to her Parliament and people, she knew that all was too late--that she would never marry, and must go childless and uncomforted to her grave. Years upon years of delusion of her people, of sacrifice to policy, had at last become a self-delusion, to which her eyes were not full opened yet--she sought to shut them tight. But these refugees, coming at the moment of her own struggle, had changed her heart from an ever-growing bitterness to human sympathy. When Angèle had ended her tale once more the Queen said: “God knows ye shall not linger in my court. Such lives have no place here. Get you back to my Isle of Jersey, where ye may live in peace. Here all is noise, self-seeking, and time-service. If ye twain are not happy I will say the world should never have been made.” Before they left Greenwich Palace--M. Aubert and Angèle, De la Forêt, Lemprière, and Buonespoir--the Queen made Michel de la Forêt the gift of a chaplaincy to the crown. To Monsieur Aubert she gave a small pension, and in Angèle’s hands she placed a deed of dower worthy of a generosity greater than her own. At Southampton Michel and Angèle were married by royal license, and with the Comtesse de Montgomery set sail in Buonespoir’s boat, the _Honeyflower_, which brought them safe to St. Helier’s, in the Isle of Jersey. XX Followed several happy years for Michel and Angèle. The protection of the Queen herself, the chaplaincy she had given De la Forêt, the friendship with the governor of the island, and the boisterous tales Lemprière had told of those days at Greenwich Palace quickened the sympathy and held the interest of the people at large, while the simple lives of the two won their way into the hearts of all, even, at last, to that of De Carteret of St. Ouen’s. It was Angèle herself who brought the two seigneurs together at her own good table; and it needed all her tact on that occasion to prevent the ancient foes from drinking all the wine in her cellar.