Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little off her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true; but also a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever addressed her in anything approaching this manner, no one had ever so much as suggested that her existence could matter greatly, that in her woman’s nature there was the magic power of awakening passion and devotion. He was so splendidly magnificent, so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus to lay his being, as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a little, who knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to repulse him, and the effort was not very convincing. “Hush, monsieur, for pity’s sake! You must not talk so to me. It ... it hurts.” O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he wounded, for she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But he in his egregious vanity must of course misunderstand. “Hurts!” he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have warned her. “Because you resist it, because you fight against the commands of your true self. Anne!” He seized her, and crushed her to him. “Anne!” Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger, too, her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A scream, loud and piercing, broke from her and rang through the still garden. It brought him to his senses. It was as if he had been lifted up into the air, and then suddenly allowed to fall. He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips, and when an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in alarm, his hand upon his sword, those two stood with the width of the avenue between them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen breathing hard and trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as if to repress its tumult. “Madame! Madame!” had been Putange’s cry, as he sprang forward in alarm and self-reproach. He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other in bewilderment. Neither spoke. “You cried out, Madame,” M. de Putange reminded her, and Buckingham may well have wondered whether presently he would be receiving M. de Putange’s sword in his vitals. He must have known that his life now hung upon her answer. “I called you, that was all,” said the Queen, in a voice that she strove to render calm. “I confess that I was startled to find myself alone with M. L’Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again, M. de Putange!” The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from his sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions as to what must have happened. But he was relieved there were to be no complications. The others now coming up with them, the party thereafter kept together until presently Buckingham and Lord Holland took their leave.