“Is not she the loveliest creature you ever beheld?  I never saw such superb eyes, they absolutely seemed to lighten just now.  Cuthbert, did you only notice how she looked right at me?  I daresay my solitaires attracted her attention—­and no wonder, they are the largest in the house, and these actresses always have an eye to the very best jewellery.  Of course it must have been my diamonds.”

From the moment when Amy Robsart entered, Cuthbert Laurance felt a strange magnetic thrill dart through every fibre of his frame; his sluggish pulse stirred, and as her mesmeric brown eyes, luminous, overmastering, met his, he drew his breath in quick gasps, and his heart in its rapid throbbing seemed to pour liquid fire into the bounding arteries.  Some vague bewildering reminiscence danced through the clouded chambers of his brain, pointing like a mocking fiend now this way, then in an opposite direction; one instant assuring him that they had somewhere met before, the next torturing him with the triumphant taunt that he had hitherto never known any one half so lovely.  Was it merely some lucky accident that had so unexpectedly brought them during that long flattering gaze thoroughly en rapport?

He no more heard his wife’s hoarse whisper, than if a cyclone had whirled between them, and, leaning forward to catch the measured melody that floated from the countess’s lips, a crimson glow fired his cheek as he caught the lofty words.

“I know a cure for jealousy.  It is to speak truth to my lord at all times; to hold up my mind, my thoughts, before him as pure as that polished mirror, so that when he looks into my heart he shall see only his own features reflected there.[*] Can he who took my little hands and made them wifely, laying therein the precious burden of his honour, afford to doubt the palms are clean?”

[Footnote:  * Mrs. Orme’s interpolations are all italicized.]

No wonder Varney stared, and the prompter anathematized the sudden flicker of the gas jet that caused him to lose his place; there was no such written sentence as the last, and the rehearsal proved no sure index of all the countess uttered that night, but the play rolled on, and when the folding doors flew open and Amy sprang to meet her noble husband, the house began to warm into an earnest sympathy.

In the scene that followed she sat with childlike simplicity and grace on the footstool at Leicester’s feet, while he exhibited the jewelled decorations of his princely garb, and explained the significance of the various orders; and in the face upturned to him who filled the chair of state there was a wealth of loving tenderness that might have moved colder natures than that which now kindled in the deep violent eyes that watched her from the minister’s box.

Gradually the curious, timid, admiring bride is merged in the wife, with ambition budding in her heart, and exacting pride pleading for recognition and wifely dignities, and in this transformation the power of the woman asserted itself.