“Then is our season ended?”
“You are Lady Chesterfield,” he said. “Is not that sufficient answer?”
“I want no wifehood without love, Philip. Has so little of me proved so much?”
He shrugged in a way which might have meant anything or nothing. She went on—
“Or did you woo me under false pretences from the first, making me, as I more than suspect, merely your unconscious stalking-horse to the King’s favour?”
He laughed, but a little uneasily.
“You get these fancies into your head,” he said.
“I do,” she answered; “but they come, I think, to stay. They are not like your fancies—for this woman or the other—that can be put off or on to suit your worldly convenience. The King has claimed one of your fancies, has he not, my lord—a wedded woman, too, Barbara Palmer by name? That was a shameful thing for both of you; but most shameful for the man who could deceive an innocent maid to curry favour with his sovereign. Did you not marry me to show him your heart was wholly divorced from that earlier idol?”
He drew in his breath, with an oath.
“By God, madam, this is too much!”