A few who had served her in the sunny land of France adhered to her with unshaken resolution, despising all inconveniences, setting at naught all dangers, save that separation from a mistress, whom, to have attended once, was to love for ever. Among those few was De Chastelar. The alteration in her condition had undoubtedly suggested to the widowed queen the necessity of an alteration in her conduct toward De Chastelar, particularly when it was added, that familiarity between a creature so young and lovely as herself and a gentleman so noble, even in his melancholy, as the chamberlain, would have at once excited the indignation of her stern and rigid subjects. In these circumstances it would perhaps have been a wiser, though not a more considerate plan, to have confided the cause of her embarrassment to the causer of it, and to have requested his absence from her court. It was not, however, in Mary’s nature to give pain, if she could possibly avoid it, to the meanest animal, much less to a friend valued and esteemed, as he who was the innocent cause of her anxiety. She adopted, therefore, what, being always the most easy, is ever the most dangerous, an intermediate course. In public De Chastelar received no marks of approbation from the queen, much less of regard from the woman; but in her hours of retirement, when surrounded by the ladies of her court, the most of whom had followed her footsteps northward from gay Paris, she delighted to efface from his mind the recollections of neglect before the eyes of the censorious Scots, by a delicacy of attention, and a warmth of friendship, which, while it fully answered her end of soothing his wounded feelings, led him to cherish ideas most fatal in the end to his own happiness, and to that of the fair being whom he so adored. It was with a heightened color and throbbing breast that Mary turned to address her unconfessed lover, yet there was no flutter in the clear, soft voice with which she spoke. “We would thank,” she said, “the sieur de Chastelar for the delightful sounds by which he has rendered our walk on this sweet evening even more agreeable than the mild air and cloudless heaven could have done without his minstrelsey. Yet ’twas a mournful strain, De Chastelar,” she continued, “and one which, if we err not, flows from a wounded heart. Would that we knew the object of so true a servant’s worship, that we might whisper our royal pleasure in her ear, that she should list the suit of one whom we regard so highly. Is she in truth so obdurate, this fair of thine, De Chastelar? she must be hard of heart to slight so gallant a cavalier.” “Not so, your grace,” replied the astonished lover, in a voice scarcely less sonorous than the music he had made so lately. “She to whom all my vows are paid, she who has ever owned the passionate aspirations of a devoted heart, is as pre-eminently raised in all the sweet and amiable sentiments of the mind as is unrivalled beauty above all mortal beings.”