She had
conquered him at last. The man of giant intellect and haughty will had
bowed to her. She held him by a thread, he who ruled the fate of
nations!--and she loved him so dearly! But the Pythoness was not wholly
tamed, and she could not even yet forget her wrongs.

"You told me before I spoke falsehoods to you, Lord Earlscourt; my word
would find no more credence now."

He looked at her, dropped her hand, and turned away, before Beatrice
could detain him. Five minutes after he left the house. Little as I
guessed it, he was jealous of me--I! who never in my own life rivalled
any man who wished to _marry_! Beatrice had fully revenged herself. I
wonder if she enjoyed it quite as much as she had anticipated, as she
stood where he had left her looking out on the Green Park?

I went with Beatrice and her party to the Lords that night; it was the
tug of war for the bill which Earlscourt was so determined should pass,
and a great speech was expected from him. We were not disappointed. When
he rose he spoke with effort, and his oratory suffered from the slight
hoarseness of his voice, for half the beauty of his rhetoric lay in the
flexibility and music of his tones; still, it was emphatically a great
speech, and Beatrice Boville listened to it breathlessly, with her eyes
fixed on the face--weary, worn, but grandly intellectual--of the man
whom Europe reverenced, and she--a girl of twenty!--ruled. Perhaps her
heart smote her for the lines she had added there; perhaps she felt her
pride misplaced to him, great as he was, with his stainless honor and
unequalled genius; perhaps she thought of how, with all his strength,
his hand had trembled as it touched hers; and how, with all her love,
she had been wilful and naughty to him a second time. His voice grew
weaker as he ended, and he spoke with visible effort; still it was one
of his greatest political triumphs: his bill passed by a large majority,
and the papers, the morning after, filled their leading articles with
admiration of Viscount Earlscourt's speech. But before those journals
were out, Earlscourt was too ill almost to notice the success of his
measures: as he left the House, the presiding devil of beloved Albion,
that plays the deuce with English statesmen as with Italian
cantatrices,--the confounded east wind,--had caught him, finished what
over-exertion had begun, and knocked him over, prostrated with severe
bronchitis. What pity it is that the body _will_ levy suc