The Prince was silent.
"I have been," continued Mary, very low, "so happy here—in the life most suited to me, in this dear country, where every one is so good as to love me a little."
The candlelight glimmered in the little braid of pearls in her hair and flowed in lines of light down her thick satin gown, showed, too, her cheek colourless and glistening with tears.
The Prince, standing close to her, with his back to the window, watched, but neither spoke nor moved.
"It is nigh ten years," she said, "since you went to the war ... and now the peace will be broken again.... And I know not how I can well bear it if you leave me."
The Prince was still silent, and studied her dimly seen face (for her back was to the light) with what was almost a passionate attention.
"I am a poor creature," she added, with a kind of desperate contempt for herself, "to think of my wretched self at such a juncture; what are my own melancholies compared to what you must undergo? Yet, humanly speaking, I have no courage to face this crisis ... that my father should be guilty of such a horrible crime against Church and State, and you bound by your duty to oppose him by force——"
"It had to be," said the Prince sombrely. "This rupture was inevitable from the first, though I tried to deny it to myself. But in my heart I knew, yea, ever since '72, that England would never get herself out of this tangle from within."
"But it is hard," replied Mary; "even though I know the hand of God in it——"
She turned her eyes, tearless now, but moist and misty, on her husband, and added simply—