visage became charged with smiles. For him
she would do anything. Yielding to his encouragements, she began to
emerge from her seclusion; she appeared in London in semi-state, at
hospitals and concerts; she opened Parliament; she reviewed troops and
distributed medals at Aldershot. But such public signs of favour were
trivial in comparison with her private attentions. During his flours of
audience, she could hardly restrain her excitement and delight. "I can
only describe my reception," he wrote to a friend on one occasion, "by
telling you that I really thought she was going to embrace me. She was
wreathed with smiles, and, as she tattled, glided about the room like
a bird." In his absence, she talked of him perpetually, and there was
a note of unusual vehemence in her solicitude for his health. "John
Manners," Disraeli told Lady Bradford, "who has just come from Osborne,
says that the Faery only talked of one subject, and that was her Primo.
According to him, it was her gracious opinion that the Government should
make my health a Cabinet question. Dear John seemed quite surprised at
what she said; but you are used to these ebullitions." She often sent
him presents; an illustrated album arrived for him regularly from
Windsor on Christmas Day. But her most valued gifts were the bunches of
spring flowers which, gathered by herself and her ladies in the woods at
Osborne, marked in an especial manner the warmth and tenderness of her
sentiments. Among these it was, he declared, the primroses that he loved
the best. They were, he said, "the ambassadors of Spring, the gems and
jewels of Nature." He liked them, he assured her, "so much better for
their being wild; they seem an offering from the Fauns and Dryads of
Osborne." "They show," he told her, "that your Majesty's sceptre has
touched the enchanted Isle." He sat at dinner with heaped-up bowls of
them on every side, and told his guests that "they were all sent to me
this morning by the Queen from Osborne, as she knows it is my favorite
flower."

As time went on, and as it became clearer and clearer that the
Faery's thraldom was complete, his protestations grew steadily more
highly--coloured and more unabashed. At last he ventured to import
into his blandishments a strain of adoration that was almost avowedly
romantic. In phrases of baroque convolution, he conveyed the message
of his heart. "The pressure of business," he wrote, had "so absorbed and
exhausted him, that toward