She took breath.  Carinthia pressed her lips on the cheek sensible to a hiss, and Henrietta pursued, in words liker to sobs:  ’Anywhere, Cadiz, St. Jean de Luz, hospital work either, anywhere my husband likes, anything!  I want to work, or I’ll sit and rock the children.  I’m awake at last.  Janey, we’re lambs to vultures with those men.  I don’t pretend I was the perfect fool.  I thought myself so safe.  I let one of them squeeze my hand one day, he swears.  You know what a passion is; you have it for mountains and battles, I for music.  I do remember, one morning before sunrise, driving back to town out of Windsor,—­a dance, the officers of the Guards,—­and my lord’s trumpeter at the back of the coach blowing notes to melt a stone, I found a man’s hand had mine.  I remember Lord Fleetwood looking over his shoulder and smiling hard and lashing his horses.  But listen—­yes, at Calesford it happened.  He—­oh, hear the name, then; Chillon must never hear it;—­Lord Brailstone was denied the right to step on Lord Fleetwood’s grounds.  The Opera company had finished selections from my Pirata.  I went out for cool air; little Sir Meeson beside me.  I had a folded gauze veil over my head, tied at the chin in a bow.  Some one ran up to me—­Lord Brailstone.  He poured forth their poetry.  They suppose it the wine for their “beautiful woman.”  I dare say I laughed or told him to go, and he began a tirade against Lord Fleetwood.  There’s no mighty difference between one beast of prey and another.  Let me get away from them all!  Though now! they would not lift an eyelid.  This is my husband’s treasure returning to him.  We have to be burnt to come to our senses.  Janey—­oh! you do well!—­it was fiendish; old ballads, melodrama plays, I see they were built on men’s deeds.  Janey, I could not believe it, I have to believe, it is forced down my throat;—­that man, your husband, because he could not forgive my choosing Chillon, schemed for Chillon’s ruin.  I could not believe it until I saw in the glass this disfigured wretch he has made of me.  Livia serves him, she hates him for the tyrant he is; she has opened my eyes.  And not for himself, no, for his revenge on me, for my name to be as my face is.  He tossed me to his dogs; fair game for them!  You do well, Janey; he is capable of any villany.  And has been calling at Livia’s door twice a day, inquiring anxiously; begs the first appointment possible.  He has no shame; he is accustomed to buy men and women; he thinks his money will buy my pardon, give my face a new skin, perhaps.  A woman swears to you, Janey, by all she holds holy on earth, it is not the loss of her beauty—­there will be a wrinkled patch on the cheek for life, the surgeon says; I am to bear a brown spot, like a bruised peach they sell at the fruit-shops cheap.  Chillon’s Riette!  I think of that, the miserable wife I am for him without the beauty he loved so!  I think of myself as guilty, a really guilty woman, when I compare my loss with my husband’s.’