His lordship’s liveries and four grey horses made a stir in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and startled the crowd at the doors of the New Theatre; and within the house Lady Fareham and her sister divided the attention of the pit with their royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess, who no longer amused or scandalised the audience by those honeymoon coquetries which had distinguished their earlier appearances in public. Duchess Anne was growing stout, and fast losing her beauty, and Duke James was imitating his brother’s infidelities, after his own stealthy fashion; so it may be that Clarendon’s daughter was no more happy than her sister-in-law the Queen, nor than her father the Chancellor, over whom the shadows of royal disfavour were darkening. Lady Fareham lolled languidly back in her box, and let all the audience see her indifference to Fletcher’s poetic dialogue. Angela sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap, entranced by that romantic story, and the acting which gave life and reality to that poetic fable, as well it might when the incomparable Betterton played Philaster. Fareham stood beside his wife, looking down at the stage, and sometimes, as Angela looked up, their eyes met in one swift flash of responsive thought; met and glanced away, as if each knew the peril of such meetings— “If it be love To forget all respect of his own friends In thinking on your face.” Was it by chance that Fareham sighed as those lines were spoken? And again— “If, when he goes to rest (which will not be), ’Twixt every prayer he says he names you once.” And again, was it chance that brought that swift, half-angry, questioning look upon her from those severe eyes in the midst of Philaster’s tirade?— “How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions, Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven With thousand changes in one subtle web, And worn so by you. How that foolish man That reads the story of a woman’s face, And dies believing it is lost for ever.” It was Angela whose eyes unconsciously sought his when that passage occurred which had written itself upon her heart long ago at Chilton when she first read the play— “Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing Worthy your noble thoughts; ’tis not a life, ’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”