"'Twas I!" he added; "on the night before your marriage with the Dauphin, and my departure to Italy."
"Lord Earl, thou hast really a voice," said Mary, unwilling to perceive the implication of his words.
"Love will achieve any thing, when it desires to please."
"Love!" laughed the joyous Queen, in her tone of raillery. "I do not think thou very well knowest what love ought to be."
"Ah! say not so. When once kindled in a true heart," said the Earl, laying his hand upon his breast, "it can only be extinguished by death."
"Ma foi! but when a heart is so flexible that a sudden flame expands within it to-day for one, and to-morrow for another," replied Mary, (thinking of her gay husband, whose white feather was visible at times above the holly hedges), "and can never love as—as one would wish to be loved. 'Tis oddly said, that few are wedded to those they first loved."
"True, madam," said the Earl, with a lower voice; "my own poor heart hath known that too bitterly."
"Indeed!" laughed the Queen, "since when?"
"Since I first beheld thee, adorable Mary! a young and smiling maiden of seventeen, standing by the side of the puny Dauphin at the Tournelles, as his affianced bride," replied the Earl, as half kneeling he lightly kissed her hand, while all the warm passion he had first cherished for her, in the days of his heedless youth, swelled up in his bosom.
"This is too much, presumptuous lord!" said the Queen, suddenly becoming grave, as she rose from her seat, and moved slowly away. "I did but begin in jest, and thou dost end in earnest."