The husband saw the King’s eyes, too. The old hatred and jealous rage were smouldering in him still. It would not call for much to fan them into flame. His hands were clenched once more on the coverlet, a red spot burned dully in the centre of his dead white cheeks. Involuntarily he added a prayer of his own to that of his wife. “Go, Sire, go!” he cried; “go now, else thou wilt be surely ta’en.” The husband’s tones, however, had the passion without the magnetic quality of the wife’s. They grated on the King’s ear. He looked up a little startled at the man in the bed, and then he smiled. “The solicitude of our friends,” he said, “grows more and more remarkable. Never was a monarch encompassed by so much disinterestedness.” The sneer was so slight as to be hardly perceptible, but poor Farnham felt ready to slay him for it. That young man, however, by his ill-timed interposition, had retarded rather than advanced the end he wished to attain. The King settled himself more snugly upon his chair. He even requested the permission of the lady to put his weary legs upon the settle standing beside the bed. He asked her to allow him to have recourse to tobacco. A spice of mischief had now been added to his inclination. He was more firmly resolved than ever that on this day he would take his ease in his inn, in congenial society. Let to-morrow come when it might; let the consequences be what they may. The unhappy lady read the King’s doom in his demeanour. Everything was lost. Only too well did she know that the man downstairs would eagerly utilise each second the King tarried at his inn for his own profit. Despair seized her. There was nothing to be done in the face of his appalling indifference and his wilfulness. She knew, as surely as he set his legs on the settle and rested his back against her husband’s bed with something of a subtle, humorous mockery, that his fate was sealed. Her foreboding heart told her that, for the King, to-morrow would never dawn. God! he would be taken like a rat in a trap. He would be taken there, in her husband’s chamber. And who had caused him to be taken there? Who had been the unwilling agent of his tarrying? The thought was too terrible to bear. She clasped her hands to her bosom, where lay the King’s image in miniature. Again the tears trembled in the woman’s eyes. The King remarked them and took them to himself. [Illustration: CHAPTER XI _The Psychology of cowardice_] Since that first strange hour of the King’s revelation, Gamaliel Hooker had sat in his chimney-side, except for the few brief minutes in which he had done his Majesty’s behests. Very naturally, in the first shock of the King’s appearance his wits had deserted him. An event of such magnitude had never happened in his life before. It was not likely to happen in it again.