e repeated mechanically, while his heel still ground
down in loathing the shattered paper into the grass. "There can be
nothing worse! It is the vilest, blackest shame."

He spoke to his thoughts, not to her; the words died in his throat; a
bitter agony was on him; all the golden summer evening, all the fair
green world about him, were indistinct and unreal to his senses; he felt
as if the whole earth were of a sudden changed; he could not realize
that this thing could come to him and his--that this foul dishonor could
creep up and stain them--that this infamy could ever be of them and upon
them. All the ruin that before had fallen on him to-day was dwarfed and
banished; it looked nothing beside the unendurable horror that reached
him now.

The gay laughter of children sounded down the air at that moment; they
were the children of a French Princess seeking their playmate Venetia,
who had escaped from them and from their games to find her way to Cecil.
He motioned her to them; he could not bear even the clear and pitying
eyes of the Petite Reine to be upon him now.

She lingered wistfully; she did not like to leave him.

"Let me stay with you," she pleaded caressingly. "You are vexed at
something; I cannot help you, but Rock will--the Duke will. Do let me
ask them?"

He laid his hand on her shoulder; his voice, as he answered, was hoarse
and unsteady.

"No; go, dear. You will please me best by leaving me. Ask none--tell
none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite Reine."

She gave him a long, earnest look.

"Yes," she answered simply and gravely, as one who accepts, and not
lightly, a trust.

Then she went slowly and lingeringly, with the sun on the gold fillet
binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the shadow of her silken
lashes. When next they met again the luster of a warmer sun, that once
burned on the white walls of the palace of Phoenicia and the leaping
flame of the Temple of the God of Healing, shone upon them; and through
the veil of those sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless sovereignty
of a proud and patrician womanhood.

Alone, his head sank down upon his hands; he gave reins to the fiery
scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn seized him with every
moment that seared the words of the letter deeper and deeper down into
his brain. Until this he had never known what it was to suffer; until
this his languid creeds had held that no wise man feels strongly, and
that to glide through life