"If it were a wedding-ring, I would not accept it," she said.
"And yet you were willing to ask him to return to you."
"Oh! duke," cried the young girl in heartbroken accents, "a woman such as I am is never accepted as a consolation by a man like him."
"You do not think he will return, then?"
"Never," said Miss Grafton, in a choking voice.
"And I grieve to tell you, Mary, that he will find yonder his happiness destroyed, his mistress lost to him. His honor even has not escaped. What will be left him, then, Mary, equal to your affection? Do you answer, Mary, you who know yourself so well."
Miss Grafton placed her white hand on Buckingham's arm, and, while Raoul was hurrying away with headlong speed, she sang in dying accents the line from "Romeo and Juliet": "I must begone and live, or stay and die."
As she finished the last word, Raoul had disappeared. Miss Grafton returned to her own apartment, paler than death itself. Buckingham availed himself of the arrival of the courier, who had brought the letter to the king, to write to Madame and to the Comte de Guiche. The king had not been mistaken, for at two in the morning the tide was at full flood, and Raoul had embarked for France.