He stood before it, his face a strange mixture of pain and doubt and tenderness. “I don’t know. No one but myself would see the least resemblance, and yet I have always seen it from the first, even in that mad trick of acting as a beggar girl. Seen and yet not believed, the obvious being always the hardest thing to find. Rags! when I looked for such untold perfection,” and suddenly he laughed, and the Temple rafters echoed it, not at all hollowly. “Well may St Armand laugh; I’d laugh myself if I were one whit less in love with her. Fool that I was! And that last time--oh Heaven! that I should so far forget myself! And blaming him! thinking her one of his tools--a puppet with a devilish resemblance, worked up by his skill to look like Rosalie! Truly he may be flattered. His jokes have been so many, so excellent, with such keen point; but this would certainly have capped them all and passed the bounds of courtesy. But anyway the High Priest’s safe, and with the beggar girl I hardly thought he was.” And then something seemed to strike him, and a shadow and a pallor crossed his face. “Safe! Who ever yet was safe on Lucifram--God or man--till the net was passed?” And the High Priest, driving home alone, thought on the Master. “Decided signs of age,” said he. “Twenty years ago, he’d have settled any woman--even Marigold. Decided signs of age.” And Marigold, walking home alone through the park, wrung her two hands silently together. “I don’t want the High Priest; I want--I want _him_--Rosalie is dead. He should forget her. Oh! I wish I’d never spoken to him so about her, if--if she is dead. What a hardened, heartless wretch he must have thought me!” And suddenly she put her hands before her face, that had grown suddenly scarlet. “He’ll think me a bad, bad woman in every way, and I’m not--I’m not--I’m good. But I can’t help the things I’ve done and said--I can’t really. I--I wish I were dead. Indeed! indeed! I do. I wasn’t made to stand alone. I was made to take hold of some one. I--I wouldn’t even mind being the third person--the strawberry--no, the gooseberry--if I might be allowed to speak to him like other people now and again.” So did Marigold argue, being the last person in the world to be content that way. CHAPTER XXV Early next morning the Princess went out to gather roses for a table decoration, and Mr Barringcourt paid an unusually early and very unexpected call. He saw her stretch up eagerly to snip a glorious damask queen, and then, before she cut it, suddenly turn to see him standing there. And her cheeks went the colour of the uncut rose, and the scissors and basket slipped out of her hand, and the gathered flowers all lay in confusion at her feet. And both of them stood looking at each other without a word, and the deep colour died away from Marigold’s face.