He laid his hand on her shoulder; his voice, as he answered, was hoarse and unsteady.

“No; go, dear.  You will please me best by leaving me.  Ask none—­tell none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite Reine.”

She gave him a long, earnest look.

“Yes,” she answered simply and gravely, as one who accepts, and not lightly, a trust.

Then she went slowly and lingeringly, with the sun on the gold fillet binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the shadow of her silken lashes.  When next they met again the luster of a warmer sun, that once burned on the white walls of the palace of Phoenicia and the leaping flame of the Temple of the God of Healing, shone upon them; and through the veil of those sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless sovereignty of a proud and patrician womanhood.

Alone, his head sank down upon his hands; he gave reins to the fiery scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn seized him with every moment that seared the words of the letter deeper and deeper down into his brain.  Until this he had never known what it was to suffer; until this his languid creeds had held that no wise man feels strongly, and that to glide through life untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it is politic.  Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately as a barbarian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his light philosophies.

“Oh, God!” he thought, “if it were anything—­anything—­except Disgrace!”

In a miserable den, an hour or so before—­there are miserable dens even in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be content with a shakedown—­two men sat in consultation.  Though the chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive wines and liqueurs.  Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity.  One of them was the “welsher,” Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a Jew, Ezra Baroni.  The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the “welsher,” heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a gloating malignity.  Excitement and the fire of very strong wines, of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of delighted tyranny.

“That precious Guards’ swell!” he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth time.  “I’ve paid him out at last!  He won’t take a ‘walk over’ again in a hurry.  Cuss them swells!  They allays die so game; it ain’t half a go after all, giving ’em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under it all, and never show they are down, even when their backers throw up the sponge.  You can’t make ’em give in, not even when they’re mortal hit; that’s the crusher of it.”