“The voice that came to me in my desolation—the sweetest sound that ever fell on a dying man’s ear,” he thought, recalling those solitary days and nights in the plague year, recalling those vanished hours with a fond longing, “that arm which shows dazzling white against the purple velvet of his sleeve is the arm that held up my aching head, in the dawn of returning reason; those are the eyes that looked down upon mine, so pitiful, so anxious for my recovery. Oh, lovely angel, I would be a leper again, a plague-stricken wretch, only to drink a cup of water from that dear hand—only to feel the touch of those light fingers on my forehead! There was a magic in that touch that surpassed the healing powers of kings. There was a light as of heaven in those benignant eyes. But, oh, she is changed since then. She is plague-stricken with the contagion of a profligate age. Her wings are scorched by the fire of this modish Tophet She has been taught to dress and look like the women around her—a little more modest—but after the same fashion. The nun I worshipped is no more.” Some one tapped him on the shoulder with an ostrich fan. He turned, and saw Lady Castlemaine close at his elbow. “Image of gloom, will you lead me to my rooms?” she asked, in a curious voice, her dark blue eyes deepened by the pallor that showed through her rouge. “I shall esteem myself too much honoured by that office,” he answered, as she took his arm and moved quickly, with hurried footsteps, through the lessening throng. “Oh, there is no one to dispute the honour with you. Sometimes I have a mob to hustle me to my lodgings, borne on the current of their adulation—sometimes I move through a desert, as I do to-night. Your face attracted me—for I believe it is the only one at Whitehall as gloomy as my own—unless there are some of my creditors, men to whom I owe gaming debts.” It was curious to note that subtle change in the faces of those they passed, which Barbara Palmer knew so well—faces that changed, obedient to the weathercock of royal caprice—the countenances of courtiers who even yet had not learnt justly to weigh the influence of that imperial favourite, or to understand that she ruled their King with a power which no transient fancy for newer faces could undermine. A day or two in the sulks, frowns and mournful looks for gossip Pepys to jot down in his diary, and the next day the sun would be shining again, and the King would be at supper with “the lady.”