ions. That the new Queen had lost her heart
to the handsome and accomplished cavalier, whose prowess in war had set
the seal on the favour won by his graces of person and mind and his
ingratiating charm, there can be small doubt; and as little that Dudley,
forgetful of the wife left to pine in solitude in her Norfolk home,
returned the devotion of the lady, now his Sovereign, who had made his
Tower prison a palace of delight.

Nor did Elizabeth make any concealment of her passion. She was a Queen;
and none should question her right to smile on any man, be he subject or
king. Before she had been a year on the Throne, Dudley was proudly
wearing the coveted Garter; was a Privy Councillor and Master of Her
Majesty's horse. She gave him fat lands and monasteries to add to the
large possessions with which her brother Edward had endowed his
favourite; and wherever she went on her Royal progresses, Robert Dudley
rode gallantly at her right hand, a King in all but name. And no Queen
ever had more splendid escort.

He was, indeed, a man after her own heart, the _beau ideal_ of a
cavalier; a lover, like herself, of pomp and splendour, a past-master of
the arts of pageantry and pleasure, and the owner of a tongue as skilled
in the language of adroit flattery as in the use of honeyed words. Such
was Robert Dudley who loved his Queen; and such the Queen who returned
undisguised admiration for flattery, and love for love.

That the greatest Kings and Princes of Europe sought the young Queen's
hand; that ambassadors tumbled over each other in their eagerness to
press on her this splendid alliance and that, mattered nothing to her.
Her hand was her own as much as her Crown--she would dispose of it as
she wished, and none should say her nay. To the fears and anger of her
people at the prospect of her alliance with a subject she was as
indifferent as to the jealousies of Dudley's Court rivals. She could
afford to smile at them all--and she did.

And, while Dudley was thus basking in the smiles of his Sovereign, the
Lady Amy was eating her heart out in loneliness and a futile jealousy in
Norfolk. Her husband, it is true, paid her a duty visit now and then,
and kept her purse well supplied for dresses she had not the heart to
wear. She knew she had lost his love, if, indeed, she had ever had it;
and she spent her days, as was known too late, in tears and prayers for
deliverance from a burden she was too weary to bear longer.

One day,