"I shall not leave you," he said hoarsely. "I will nurse you till you are well again. But you are not ill?" he added piteously. "No—tired a little." She sat up and put her hands on his shoulders. "You do not regret the day they married you to your poor little cousin?" The soft brown eyes were full of yearning. "She was such a foolish child, so ignorant——" He could not speak, but made a movement of his hands to hers as if to stop her. "Let me speak," said Mary sweetly. "I have thought so much about it lately. We learnt everything so late—our mistakes last of all, I think, and I have made many mistakes. Perhaps another woman would have helped you more. But I have done my best—I wanted to say that—I have always done my best." He managed to answer, but almost incoherently. "You shame me—utterly shame me—you—know what you have been to me——" Mary dropped her hands; the tears gathered in her eyes. "And I am childless," she faltered. He sprang up as if he wrenched himself free from torture. "Do not leave me," entreated Mary feebly. "I think I am not very well, after all, and you promised to stay—forgive me—but indeed I think of it and your great kindness." He turned about and leant over her chair. Mary clung to him with hot hands. "No one could have loved you more," she said, in great agitation—"too much, for my own peace——" Her fever-flushed face drooped against the lace on his bosom; he put his arm round her, and she gave a great sigh; the tears were on her lashes and running slowly down her face; he kissed her loose hair and the hand on his shoulder. "God," he said, in an unsteady whisper, answering his own desperate fears, "could not be so cruel." CHAPTER IX CHRISTMAS EVE Kensington House was hushed and dark; in only one room did a light burn, and that was where the Queen of England sat alone in her cabinet with the door locked and two tapers burning on her desk. It was long past midnight on Christmas Eve, and she supposed in bed; the stillness was intense; the ticking of the little brass clock sounded loud and steady—a solitary noise. Mary sat at the desk with her papers spread before her; she had burnt many of them in the candle-flame, and a little pile of ashes lay on the cold hearth. It was four days since she had first sickened, and the doctors said this and that, disagreeing with each other, and constantly changing their opinion; but Mary had never been deceived; she had cheated herself, she had cheated the King, into a belief that she was lately better, but from the moment in her bedchamber at Hampton Court when the thought of her danger had first flashed on her, she had had an absolute premonition that this was the end. All her life had been coloured by the sense she would not live past youth. The first shock over, she did not grieve for herself, but terribly, more terribly than she had conceived she could, for the King.