His voice broke with sudden passion. She raised her eyes and strove to smile; but the shudder of fatigue seized her. Without another word he lifted the cresset of charcoal from its stand, blew upon the expiring glow, cast fresh fuel upon it; then, the flame once more enkindled, flung the whole on the hearth. She watched him, and gave a little feminine cry of protest as he next seized the first thing at hand, a couple of books, and tore them up ruthlessly to feed the fire. “O, my lord!” she began, as the flame roared up the chimney. But the faint laugh died on her lips when she met his glance. “I must leave you,” he said, when he had thrown in a couple of logs. “I must leave you; it will go ill indeed, if, within the hour, I return not with coach and horses. If I have to plead King’s Service, I shall carry you out of the infection.” * * * * * The door closed on him. Left alone, Diana sighed deeply. All the bright look of courage faded from her face. How harshly he had spoken! how coldly he had looked upon her—when not averting his eyes as from something troubling!… Diana Harcourt, widow of twenty, bound by a freak of fate, through the merest impulse of womanly pity, to Rockhurst’s young son,—so faithful a lover, so gallant a youth,—knew her heart given to Rockhurst himself! What shame—what treachery! Moments were when she thought to guess her hidden love as returned; and then she felt herself strong and proud, and took a kind of high spiritual glory in the thought of how true they both would remain to honour and plighted troth. “Loved he not honour more,” as the chivalrous song had it, she would have none of his love.… But, to feel it in this sacred silence, in this noble self-denial, that was a kind of pain more exquisite than any joy she had ever known. Yet moments were, again, such as this, when his formal manner, the sombreness of his gaze, smote her with distressing conjecture. Was his solicitude but for his boy’s sake, after all? Was the self-betrayal—sweet and terrible—that had so often seemed to hover on his lips, but the gallantry of the high-bred courtier? Or—worse suspicion yet!—had he read her folly, and was it but compassion that spoke in his lingering gaze? As she sat staring dully into the fire he had kindled for her, vividly the troubled scenes of this night of catastrophe rose before her. * * * * * Her grandmother’s great card-room, lit and decked as usual; the dwindled company, each with the heavy knowledge of the peril without and about stamped upon his countenance, each with his hypocrite smile for my Lady Chillingburgh, who glared upon them from out her chair, and forbade the pestilence to exist, since she would have none of it.…