"Oh, dear," he thought, "if for no matter what reason, she had only changed her own mind!"
"In five minutes," he said bravely—"your Majesty will be at Westboro' Abbey station, our carriage has been attached to the other train which followed us from London."
With a smothered cry the Queen sprang to her feet, rushed to the window and stared out where nothing in the golden afternoon beauty revealed to her in what part of England she was. Bulstrode had put his hand out before her as if he feared she meditated climbing through the open window.
"Oh," she cried furiously, shrinking back from him, "how have you dared ... dared?"
... "To save your Majesty? Well, it was hard!" he acknowledged practically. "Harder than you will ever believe. I may say that no decision was ever more difficult to make. To be so trusted by you, and to feel myself a double-dyed villain wasn't agreeable, but the issue was a warrant for any treachery."
"Great heavens!" she exclaimed. "Who made you judge of my actions, who gave you leave to decide my fate, what a fool I was to trust you—what a fool! You have spoiled my life!" she accused him—"You have taken from me everything in the world."
If she had been alone he knew she would have wept, and he kept his face turned from her for some few seconds. "I have certainly established a precedent for myself," he mused with humor. "I can never run away with a woman now—never."
Small as were the limits of the little carriage she found means to walk it up and down several times, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing. She spoke, he supposed, in Poltavian, for he could not follow the meaning of her few staccato, angry words, but he did not recognise among the incoherences that she called him friend!
As the flying scenes grew farm-like and pastoral, and the lines and sweep of what he took to be park property, caught his eyes he once more ventured to speak.
"I am not the cold-blooded traitor I seem, believe me," he tried to plead, "and until we definitely passed the station at Redleigh Bucks I was miserable to think I had, as it seems, betrayed your Majesty. But when as we came up to the station I saw the King on the platform——"