“The prison?” said Leicester, “might be borne, but to lose your Grace’s presence were to lose light and life at once.—­Here, Sussex, is my hand.”

“And here,” said Sussex, “is mine in truth and honesty; but—­”

“Nay, under favour, you shall add no more,” said the Queen.  “Why, this is as it should be,” she added, looking on them more favourably; “and when you the shepherds of the people, unite to protect them, it shall be well with the flock we rule over.  For, my lords, I tell you plainly, your follies and your brawls lead to strange disorders among your servants.—­My Lord of Leicester, you have a gentleman in your household called Varney?”

“Yes, gracious madam,” replied Leicester; “I presented him to kiss your royal hand when you were last at Nonsuch.”

“His outside was well enough,” said the Queen, “but scarce so fair, I should have thought, as to have caused a maiden of honourable birth and hopes to barter her fame for his good looks, and become his paramour.  Yet so it is; this fellow of yours hath seduced the daughter of a good old Devonshire knight, Sir Hugh Robsart of Lidcote Hall, and she hath fled with him from her father’s house like a castaway.—­My Lord of Leicester, are you ill, that you look so deadly pale?”

“No, gracious madam,” said Leicester; and it required every effort he could make to bring forth these few words.

“You are surely ill, my lord?” said Elizabeth, going towards him with hasty speech and hurried step, which indicated the deepest concern.  “Call Masters—­call our surgeon in ordinary.—­Where be these loitering fools?—­we lose the pride of our court through their negligence.—­Or is it possible, Leicester,” she continued, looking on him with a very gentle aspect, “can fear of my displeasure have wrought so deeply on thee?  Doubt not for a moment, noble Dudley, that we could blame thee for the folly of thy retainer—­thee, whose thoughts we know to be far otherwise employed.  He that would climb the eagle’s nest, my lord, cares not who are catching linnets at the foot of the precipice.”

“Mark you that?” said Sussex aside to Raleigh.  “The devil aids him surely; for all that would sink another ten fathom deep seems but to make him float the more easily.  Had a follower of mine acted thus—­”

“Peace, my good lord,” said Raleigh, “for God’s sake, peace!  Wait the change of the tide; it is even now on the turn.”

The acute observation of Raleigh, perhaps, did not deceive him; for Leicester’s confusion was so great, and, indeed, for the moment, so irresistibly overwhelming, that Elizabeth, after looking at him with a wondering eye, and receiving no intelligible answer to the unusual expressions of grace and affection which had escaped from her, shot her quick glance around the circle of courtiers, and reading, perhaps, in their faces something that accorded with her own awakened suspicions, she said suddenly, “Or is there more in this than we see—­or than you, my lord, wish that we should see?  Where is this Varney?  Who saw him?”