He frowned and bit his lip.
"Your pardon, Madame," he rejoined more calmly now. "I was forgetting the limits of courtly manners. I have little more to say. I would not have troubled you with so much talk, knowing that my feeling in such matters can have no interest for your ladyship. When awhile ago this great bare room was at last free from the bent-backed, mouthing flatterers that surround you, I waited patiently for a spontaneous word from you, something to tell me that the honour of my name, one of the oldest in England, was not like to be stained by contact with the diplomatic by-ways of France. I had not then thought of asking for an explanation; I waited for you to speak. Instead of which I saw you take that miserable letter once more in your hand, sit and ponder over it without a thought or look for me. I saw your face, serene and placid, your attitude one of statesmanlike calm, as without a word or nod you prepared to pass out of my sight."
"Then you thought fit to demand from me an explanation of my conduct in a matter in which you swore most solemnly a year ago that you would never interfere?"
"Demand is a great word, Madame," he said, now quite gently. "I do not demand; I ask for an explanation on my knees."
And just as he had done a year ago when first she laid her hand in his and he made his profession of faith, he dropped on one knee and bent his head, until his aching brow almost touched her gown.
She looked down on him from the altitude of her domineering pride; she saw his broad shoulders, bent in perfect humility, his chestnut hair free from the conventional powder, the slender hands linked together now in a strangely nervous clasp, and she drew back because her skirt seemed perilously near his fingers.
Will the gods ever reveal the secret of a woman's heart? Lydie loathed the King's proposal, the letter which she held, just as much as Lord Eglinton did himself. Awhile ago she had hardly been able to think or to act coherently while she felt the contact of that noisome paper against her flesh. If she had smiled on Louis, if she had taken the letter away from him with vague promises that she would think the matter over, it had been solely because she knew the man with whom she had to deal better than did milor Eglinton, who had but little experience of the Court of Versailles, since he had kept away from it during the major part of his life. She had only meant to temporize with the King, because she felt sure that that was the only way to serve the Stuart Prince and to avert the treachery.
Nay, more, in her heart she felt that milor was right; she knew that when a thing is so vile and so abominable as Louis' proposed scheme, all contact with it is a pollution, and that it is impossible to finger slimy mud without some of it clinging to flesh or gown.
Yet with all that in her mind, a subtle perversity seemed suddenly to have crept into her heart, a perversity and also a bitter sense of injustice. She and her husband had been utter strangers since the day of their marriage, she had excluded him from her counsels, just as she had done from her heart and mind. She had never tried to understand him, and merely fostered that mild contempt which his diffidence and his meekness had originally roused in her. Yet at this moment when he so obviously misunderstood her, when he thought that her attitude with regard to the King's proposals was one of acceptance, or at least not of complete condemnation, her pride rose in violent revolt.
He had no right to think her so base. He had invaded her thoughts at the very moment when they dwelt on his friend and the best mode to save him; nay, more, was she not proposing to associate him, who now accused her so groundlessly, with her work of devotion and loyalty?