Lydie half smiled when the thought first took shape. She knew so little of her husband. Just now, when she heard him condemn the King's treacherous proposals with such unequivocal words of contempt, she had half despised him for this blundering want of diplomatic art. Manlike he had been unable to disguise his loathing for Louis' perfidy, and by trying to proclaim his loyalty to his friend, all but precipitated the catastrophe that would have delivered Charles Edward Stuart into the hands of the English. But for Lydie's timely interference the King, angered and huffed, would have departed then and there and matured his own schemes before anything could be done to foil them.
But with her feeling of good-natured disdain, there had even then mingled a sensation of trust; this she recalled now when her mind went in search of the man in whom she could confide. She would in any case have to ask her husband for the token agreed on between him and the Stuart Prince, and also for final directions as to the exact spot where the fugitives would be most surely found by Captain Barre.
Then why should he not himself take both to Le Havre?
Again she smiled at the thought. The idea had occurred to her that she did not even know if milor could ride. And if perchance he did sit a horse well, had he the physical strength, the necessary endurance, for that flight across country, without a halt, with scarce a morsel of food on the way?
She knew so little about him. Their lives had been spent apart. One brief year of wedded life, and they were more strange to one another than even they had been before their marriage. He no doubt thought her hard and unfeminine, she of a truth deemed him weak and unmanly.
Still there was no one else, and with her usual determination she forced her well-schooled mind to dismiss all those thoughts of her husband which were disparaging to him. She tried not to see him as she had done a little while ago, giving himself over so readily to the artificial life of this Court of Versailles and its enervating etiquette, yielding to the whispered flatteries of Irène de Stainville, pandering to her vanity, admiring her femininity no doubt in direct contrast to his wife's more robust individuality.
Afterward, whenever she thought the whole matter over, she never could describe accurately the succession of events just as they occurred on that morning. She seemed after a while to have roused herself from her meditations, having fully made up her mind to carry her project through from beginning to end, and with that infamous letter still in her hand she rose from her chair and walked across the vast audience chamber, with the intention of going to her own study, there to think out quietly the final details of her plans.
Her mind was of course intent on the Stuart Prince and his friends: on Le Monarque and Captain Barre, and also very much now on her husband; but she could never recollect subsequently at what precise moment the actual voice of Lord Eglinton became mingled with her thoughts of him.
Certain it is that, when in crossing the room she passed close to the thronelike bedstead, whereupon her strangely perturbed imagination wilfully conjured up the picture of milor holding his court, with la belle Irène in a brilliant rose-coloured gown complacently receiving his marked attentions, she suddenly heard him speak:
"One second, I entreat you, Madame, if you can spare it!"