"Your Grace does not know all the ladies of the Court."
"No! but I thought I knew all the pretty ones. Yet meseems that beauty was but an empty word now that I have seen its queen."
"Ah, my lord! I fear me your reputation doth not wrong you after all!" she added with a quaint little sigh.
"Why? What is my reputation?"
"They call you fickle, and say the Duke of Wessex loves many women a little . . . but constantly, not at all."
He came a step closer to her, and tried to meet her eyes.
"Then will you let me prove them wrong?" he said with sudden seriousness, which perhaps then he could not himself have accounted for.
"I? . . ." she said artlessly, "what must I do for that?"
"Anything you like," he replied.
"Nay, I have no power; for I fear me nothing short of putting Your Grace under lock and key would cure you of that fickleness."