Above the yellow brocade chair where she now sat was a shelf laden with vases and figures of extraordinary shapes and violent colours. Mary loved them all; she looked up at them with a little smile, then took up the book from which she had been reading to her ladies, but dropped it on to her lap, and sat with an air of lassitude, gazing into the flames.
"The truth is," she said, "I have a great headache, and have had one this three days past."
"It is the wind," answered Lady Nottingham.
Mary shivered.
"I have taken cold, I think," she remarked. She laughed; she was more than usual gay.
She was expecting the King in a few days, and, for the moment, the troubles and difficulties had a little cleared from his path. For the first time since the war began the last campaign had decided in favour of the allies; the weight of England was beginning to tell in the balance. Mary could not forget that; it coloured her days with pleasure.
"I think the ball will be popular," she continued irrelevantly; "every one seemeth very pleased——"
"What is the date, Madam?" asked Lady Temple.
"The twenty-eighth—about a week from now," answered Mary. "I am to have a new dress!" She laughed again; she seemed, for her, to be very excited. "I shall put it on presently, and you must judge of it."
She leant back in her chair, and was suddenly silent. The short day was darkening; sullen crimson, presaging rain, burnt fitfully in the west, and a gloomy brightness reflected through the windows of the great gallery, and struck changeful colour from the mother-of-pearl figures on the black china screens.