cate hands.

Supper was at an end. The Queen lounged on a long seat over against the
tapestried wall. The Countess of Argyll, in a tall chair on the Queen's
left, sat with elbows on the table watching the Seigneur Davie's fine
fingers as they plucked softly at the strings of a long-necked lute. The
talk, which, intimate and untrammelled, had lately been of the child
of which Her Majesty was to be delivered some three months hence, was
flagging now, and it was to fill the gap that Rizzio had taken up the
lute.

His harsh countenance was transfigured as he caressed the strings, his
soul absorbed in the theme of his inspiration. Very softly--indeed, no
more than tentatively as yet--he was beginning one of those wistful airs
in which his spirit survives in Scotland to this day, when suddenly the
expectant hush was broken by a clash of curtain-rings. The tapestries
that masked the door had been swept aside, and on the threshold,
unheralded, stood the tall, stripling figure of the young King.

Darnley's appearance abruptly scattered the Italian's inspiration. The
melody broke off sharply on the single loud note of a string too rudely
plucked.

That and the silence that followed it irked them all, conveying a sense
that here something had been broken which never could be made whole
again.

Darnley shuffled forward. His handsome face was pale save for the two
burning spots upon his cheekbones, and his eyes glittered feveredly. He
had been drinking, so much was clear; and that he should seek the Queen
thus, who so seldom sought her sober, angered those intimates who had
come to share her well-founded dislike of him. King though he might be
in name, into such contempt was he fallen that not one of them rose
in deference, whilst Mary herself watched his approach with hostile,
mistrusting eyes.

"What is it, my lord?" she asked him coldly, as he flung himself down on
the settle beside her.

He leered at her, put an arm about her waist, pulled her to him, and
kissed her oafishly.

None stirred. All eyes were upon them, and all faces blank. After all,
he was the King and she his wife. And then upon the silence, ominous
as the very steps of doom, came a ponderous, clanking tread from the
ante-room beyond. Again the curtains were thrust aside, and the Countess
of Argyll uttered a gasp of sudden fear at the grim spectre she beheld
there. It was a figure armed as for a tourney, in gleaming steel from
head to foot, girt with a