My Lord Gore was to sup with them at six o’clock that evening. Barbara looked calmly toward the hour, as though her heart had emptied itself of all emotion. There was no anger in her, no haste, no clash of horror and regret. “I shall kill him to-night,” she said to herself, quite quietly, as though there could be no other ending to that three years’ vigil. Judged by the ordinary sentiment of life, men would have called her utterly callous, execrably vindictive, a thing without any heart in her to feel or fear. Yet fireside judgments are shallow things. No man knows what a hanging is like till he happens to drive in the tumbrel to Tyburn, and the imagination looks for lurid lights where everything may be as calm and cold as snow. It is easy for a man to sit as judge with the stem of a pipe between his teeth and a good dinner inside him. He has no more knowledge of what love and desire and vengeance and death may be than a plum-pudding can know the thoughts inside the head of the woman who stirred it in the making. At noon Barbara dined with her mother, and in a Venetian vase upon the table there were some late roses sent from my Lord Gore’s garden at Bushy. The subtle scent of the flowers remained with the memory of that day like the perfume from censers before a sacrifice. After dinner she dressed herself, and, taking the girl who waited on her as maid, walked in the park and down past Whitehall toward the river. The girl with her noticed nothing strange, save that she was very silent, and seemed not to see the people who went by. Leaning over the parapet of the river-walk, Barbara saw a barge moored near in, and a couple of brown children sitting at the top of the cabin steps and blowing bubbles from broken clay pipes. The soapy water in the porringer between them would not have been wasted had it been used upon their faces. But they were so brown and healthy and happy watching the bubbles sail and burst that Barbara turned away from the water-side with the first pang of the heart that she had felt that day. Coming back past Whitehall a troop of the King’s guard came by with drums beating and trumpets blowing, and all the pomp of the Palace in their red coats and burnished steel. The girl with Barbara stopped to stare; but Barbara walked on under Hans Holbein’s gate, letting a crowd of boys rush past her to see the redcoats and hear the trumpets.