“His son has the manners of a Frenchman and the morals of a Turk. He is a despot to his wife and a slave to his mistress. There never was greater cruelty to a woman than his Majesty’s treatment of Catherine while she was still but a stranger in the land, and when he forced his notorious paramour upon her as her lady of honour. Of honour, quotha! There was sorry store of honour in his conduct. He had need feel the sting of remorse t’other day when the poor lady was thought to be on her death-bed—so gentle, so affectionate, so broken to the long-suffering of consort-queens, apologising for having lived to trouble him. Ned Hyde has given me the whole story of that poor lady’s subjugation, for he was behind the scenes, and in their secrets. Poor soul! Blood rushed from her ears and nostrils when that shameless woman was brought to her, and she was carried swooning to her chamber. And then she was sullen, and the King threatened her, and sent away all her Portuguese, save one ancient waiting woman. I grant you they were ugly devils, fit to set in a field to frighten crows; but Catherine loved them. Royal treatment for a Christian Queen from a Christian King! Could the Sophy do worse? And presently the poor lady yielded (as most women will, for at heart they are slavish and love to be beaten), and after holding herself aloof for a long time—a sad, silent, neglected figure where all the rest were loud and merry—she made friends with the lady, and even seemed to fawn upon her.” “And now I dare swear the two women mingle their tears when Charles is unfaithful to both; or Catherine weeps while Barbara curses. That would be more in character. Fire and not water is her ladyship’s element.” “Ah, Denzil, ’tis a curious change; and to have lived to see Buckingham murdered, and Strafford sacrificed, and the Rebellion, and the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, and the Plague, and the Fire, and to have skirmished in the battles of Parliaments and Princes, t’other side the Channel, and seen the tail of the Thirty Years’ War, towns ruined, villages laid waste, where Tilly passed in blood and fire, is to have lived through as wild a variety of fortunes as ever madman invented in a dream.” Denzil lingered at the Manor, urged again and again by his host to stay over the day fixed for departure, and so lengthening his visit with a most willing submission till late in June, when the silence of the nightingales made sleep more possible, and the sunset was so late and the sunrise so early that there seemed to be no such thing as night. He had made up his mind to plead for a hearing in the hour of farewell; and it may have been as much from apprehension of that fateful hour as even from the delight of being in his mistress’s company that he acceded with alacrity when Sir John desired him to stay. But an end must come at last to all hesitations, and a familiar verse repeated itself in his brain with the persistent iteration of cathedral chimes—