testy Majesty dropped his napkin and required another.  No attendant was immediately at hand.  My Lord Marlborough—­the most talked of man in Europe, and some say, at this juncture, as powerful as half a dozen Kings—­rose and handed his Majesty the piece of linen as simply as if it were but becoming that he should serve as lackey a royalty so important—­and with such repose of natural dignity that ’twas he who seemed majestic, and not the man he waited on.  Since then all goes with comparative smoothness.  If a Queen’s favoured counsellor and greatest general so serves him, the little potentate feels his importance properly valued.”

“But if one who knows his Lordship had looked straight in his eyes,” said Roxholm, “he could have seen the irony within them—­held like a spark of light.  I have seen it.”

When my Lord Marlborough went to the Hague to take command of the Dutch and English forces, and to draw the German power within the confederacy, he took with him more than one young officer notable for his rank and brilliant place in the world, it having become at this period the fashion to go to the wars in the hope that a young Marlborough might lurk beneath any smart brocade and pair of fine shoulders.  Among others, his Lordship was attended on his triumphal way by the already much remarked young Marquess of Roxholm, and it was realized that this fortunate young man went not quite as others did, but as one on whom the chief had fixed his attention, and for whom he had a liking.

In truth, he had marked in him certain powers and qualities, which were both agreeable to his tastes and promised usefulness.  He had not employed his own powers and charms, physical and mental, from his fifteenth year upward, without having learned the actual weight and measure of their potency, as a man knows the weight and size of a thing he can put into scales and measure with a yardstick.  He remembered well hours, when the fact that he was of a beauteous shape and height, and gazed at others with a superb appealing eye, had made that difference which lies between failure and success; he had never forgot one of the occasions upon which the power of keeping silence under provocation or temptation, the ability to control each feature and compel it to calm sweetness, had served him as well as a regiment of soldiers might have served him.  Each such experience he had retained mentally for future reference.  Roxholm possessed this power to restrain himself, and to keep silent, reflecting, and judging meanwhile, and was taller than he, of greater grace, and unconscious state of bearing; his beauty of countenance had but increased as he grew to manhood.

“I was the handsomest lad at Court in the year ’65,” his Grace of Marlborough said once (he had been made Duke by this time).  “The year you were born I was the handsomest man in the army, they used to say—­but I was no such beauty and giant as you, Marquess.  The gods were en veine when they planned you.”