"Trust me to act as is best for thee and for our sons," replied Charles firmly. "Trust me to so acquit myself to God as to be worthy of thy love."
The Queen regarded him with a wise little smile, then pulled a toy watch of diamonds from the lace at her bosom and glanced at it with eyes that flashed a little.
"With quick riding and sharp relays, my lord might almost be here," she remarked.
Charles sank into the great chair with arms by the window, and bent his gaze on the floor. His whole figure had a drooping and fatigued look; he mechanically fingered the deep points of lace edging his cambric cuffs.
Henriette Marie dropped the watch back behind the knot of orange velvet on her breast, and her glance, that was so quick and keen behind the misty softness that veiled it, travelled rapidly over her husband's person.
She noted the grey hairs in his love-locks, the lines of anxiety across his brow and round his mouth, his unnatural pallor, the nervous twitching of his lips. He was the dearest thing on earth to her, but she had been married to him nearly twenty years and she knew his weakness, his faults, too well to any longer regard him as that Prince of romance which he had at first appeared to her. His figure, as she looked at him now, seemed to her strangely tragical; she could have wept for this man who leant on her when she should have leant on him, this man whom she would have despised if she had not loved.
"Holy Virgin," she said passionately to herself, "give him strength and me courage."
She went to her table and began to put away her work. The King raised his narrowed wistful eyes and said abruptly—
"Supposing the Earl doth not come? We are as likely to be hounded from Whitehall as His Grace from Lambeth if my lord disappoints the people."
"He will come," said Henriette Marie, delicately putting away her beads and silks in a tortoise-shell box lined with blue satin and redolent of English lavender.