She was writing letters at a side table, and when he entered rose up instantly, with a little sigh of relief. "’Tis so wild abroad to-night," she said. The Earl laid down on the mantelshelf the overblown white rose he had brought from Whitehall, and looked at his wife. "I see we also rejoice that the bishops are acquitted," he remarked. "The candles, you mean? It had to be—all the windows had been broken else. They needed to call the soldiers out to protect the Chapel in Sardinia Street." He seated himself at the centre table and pulled from his pocket several opened letters that he scattered before him; his wife came and stood opposite, and they looked at each other intently across the candles. "What doth it mean?" she asked. "That the King walketh blindly on to ruin," he answered concisely, with a wicked flashing glance over the correspondence before him. "The People will not take much more?" "No." "Well," said Lady Sunderland restlessly, "we are safe enough." He was turning over the papers, and now lowered his eyes to them. "Some of your letters to my Uncle Sidney have been opened," he remarked. "This is M. Barillon his work—the King taxed me to-day with being privy to the intrigue." "I have thought lately that we were suspected," she answered quickly. "Is this—serious?" "No; I can do anything with the King, and he is bigot, blind, and credulous to a monstrous degree." "Even after to-day!" exclaimed my lady. "He believeth the nation will never turn against him," said the Earl quietly. "He thinketh himself secure in his heir—and in the Tories." "Not half the people will allow the child is the Queen’s, though," she answered. "Even the Princess Anne maketh a jest of it with her women, and saith His Highness was smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan by a Jesuit father——" "So you have also heard that news?" "Who could help it? ’Tis common talk that ’tis but a device of the King to close the succession to the Princess Mary. And though you and I, my lord, know differently, this tale is as good as another to lead the mobile." The Earl was slowly burning the letters before him by holding them in the flame of the wax-light of a taper-holder, and when they were curled away casting them on the floor and putting his red heel on them. "What are these?" asked the Countess, watching him. "Part of His Majesty’s foreign correspondence, my dear, warning him to have an eye to His Highness the Stadtholder." She laughed, half nervously. "It seemeth as if you cut away the ladder on which you stood," she said. "If the King should suspect too soon—or the Prince fail you——" "I take the risks," said Sunderland. "I have been taking risks all my life." "But never one so large as this, my lord."