My Lady Fanny had been within his sight all that evening, beautiful and glittering. He had seen her blue eyes turn his way and hastily averted—those bright audacious eyes that never dropt before another. But the magic of her presence was evaporated. He saw her and marvelled that she had swept him away into an emotion he was now incapable of feeling. Diana stood before him, and to hold that proud but shy beauty in his arms, to know it his and his only, to have those lips against his own, that velvet cheek pressed to his, and more than all this, to know himself the conqueror where he had been disdained,—there was nothing in heaven nor earth that he would not have given at that moment to bend her to his will, and none the less because her bright graces had made her this night the idol of the only world he valued. Her possession would exalt him beyond all former successes. Not a man but would envy him,—not a tongue but would tell his triumph.
He prest nearer to her.
“I loved you before your success, Madam, therefore you know my love honest, and your success I value not because it does but give you hundreds of lovers more to plunge me in jealousy and despair. Yet tonight—though I had rehearsed all your charms and each a dagger in my heart, I discovered something—O how can I name the unspeakable!—even more bewitching. Indeed you are a jewel a King might wear in his crown. Beloved, worshipt, O hear your adorer. My dearest life, I entreat!”
She drew herself back against the wainscot and stood there quivering, but with a courage that surprised herself after to recall it. ’Twas the courage of the deer at bay.
“My Lord, I have returned you no answer and you had done better to take that as it was meant. But since it is not so I will ask you this. What do you offer me?”
The clear candour of her tone together with her direct gaze for a moment nonplussed him, but he recovered his coolness quickly. Aha! so the sweet frost-piece could traffic against her virtue! Then the bargain was all but sealed.
“Madam, my whole heart. My adoration. My entire and eternal devotion. And more.”
“What more, Sir?”
“Madam, yourself shall write what conditions you will and this hand subscribe them unread—even to the half of my kingdom, as another lover said long since.”
“That lover addrest his offer to his wife, my Lord, if I remember the Scripture rightly. Do you?”