“To Lorraine, cousin?” says Beatrix, laying her hand on his arm; ’twas the hand on which she wore the Duke’s bracelet.  “Stay, Harry!” continued she, with a tone that had more despondency in it than she was accustomed to show.  “Hear a last word.  I do love you.  I do admire you—­who would not, that has known such love as yours has been for us all?  But I think I have no heart; at least I have never seen the man that could touch it; and, had I found him, I would have followed him in rags had he been a private soldier, or to sea, like one of those buccaneers you used to read to us about when we were children.  I would do anything for such a man, bear anything for him:  but I never found one.  You were ever too much of a slave to win my heart; even my Lord Duke could not command it.  I had not been happy had I married him.  I knew that three months after our engagement—­and was too vain to break it.  Oh, Harry!  I cried once or twice, not for him, but with tears of rage because I could not be sorry for him.  I was frightened to find I was glad of his death; and were I joined to you, I should have the same sense of servitude, the same longing to escape.  We should both be unhappy, and you the most, who are as jealous as the Duke was himself.  I tried to love him; I tried, indeed I did:  affected gladness when he came:  submitted to hear when he was by me, and tried the wife’s part I thought I was to play for the rest of my days.  But half an hour of that complaisance wearied me, and what would a lifetime be?  My thoughts were away when he was speaking; and I was thinking, Oh that this man would drop my hand, and rise up from before my feet!  I knew his great and noble qualities, greater and nobler than mine a thousand times, as yours are, cousin, I tell you, a million and a million times better.  But ’twas not for these I took him.  I took him to have a great place in the world, and I lost it.  I lost it, and do not deplore him—­and I often thought, as I listened to his fond vows and ardent words, Oh, if I yield to this man, and meet the other, I shall hate him and leave him!  I am not good, Harry:  my mother is gentle and good like an angel.  I wonder how she should have had such a child.  She is weak, but she would die rather than do a wrong; I am stronger than she, but I would do it out of defiance.  I do not care for what the parsons tell me with their droning sermons:  I used to see them at court as mean and as worthless as the meanest woman there.  Oh, I am sick and weary of the world!  I wait but for one thing, and when ’tis done, I will take Frank’s religion and your poor mother’s, and go into a nunnery, and end like her.  Shall I wear the diamonds then?—­they say the nuns wear their best trinkets the day they take the veil.  I will put them away as you bid me; farewell, cousin:  mamma is pacing the next room racking her little head to know what we have been saying.  She is jealous, all women are.  I sometimes think that is the only womanly quality I have.”