She said no more, and they sat hand in hand wrapped in thought. Even when he got up to go he said nothing, and his hand as it held hers was as cold as ice. CHAPTER XXXVIII. It had come so suddenly as to almost overwhelm her; the great gift of the gods that she had been waiting, aye, and plotting for, had fallen to her at last, and her cup of triumph was full to overbrimming, but at the same time she, as Lord Charles would have put it, "kept her head." She thoroughly understood how and why she had gained her will. She could read Leycester as if he were a book, and she knew that, although he had asked her to be his wife, he had not forgotten that other girl with the brown hair and dark eyes--that "Stella," the painter's niece. This was a bitter pang to her, a drop of gall to her cup, but she accepted it. Just as Jasper said of Stella, so she said of Leycester. "I will make him love me!" she thought. "The time shall come when he will wonder how he came to think of that other, and be filled with self-contempt for having so thought of her." And she set about her work well. Some women in the hour of their triumph, would have shown their delight, and so worried, or perhaps disgusted, their lover; but not so did Lady Lenore. She took matters with an ineffable calm and serenity, and never for one moment allowed it to be seen how much she had gained on that eventful evening. To Leycester her manner was simply charming. She exerted herself to win him without permitting the effort to be even guessed at. Her very beauty seemed to grow more brilliant and bewitching. She moved about the place "like a poem," as Lord Charles declared. Her voice, always soft and musical, with unexpected harmonies, that charmed by their very surprises, was like music; and, more important still, it was seldom heard. She exacted none of the privileges of an engaged woman; she did not expect Leycester to sit with her by the hour, or walk about with her all day, or to whisper tender speeches, and lavish secret caresses. Indeed, she almost seemed to avoid being alone with him; in fact she humored him to the top of his bent, so that he did not even feel the chain with which he had bound himself. And he was grateful to her; gradually the charm of her presence, the music of her voice, the feeling that she belonged to him told upon him, and he found himself at times sitting, watching, and listening to her with a strange feeling of pleasure. He was only mortal and she was not only supremely beautiful, but supremely clever. She had set herself to charm him, and he would have been less, or more than man, if he had been able to resist her.