"My Charles, let him go—let us be happy again—do not, for this scruple, risk everything! My dear, give way—it must be—we are in danger—oh, listen to me!"
He stared at her with eyes clouded with suffering.
"Couldst thou but put this eloquence on the other side I might be a happier man," he said. "Strengthen my conscience, do not weaken it."
His tone was as pleading as hers had been, but she perceived that he was still obdurate on the main part of her entreaty, and she slipped from his clasp and knelt at his feet in a genuine passion of tears.
"You have had the last of me!" she sobbed. "I will not stay where neither my dignity nor my life is safe. Keep Strafford and let me go!"
The King turned away with feeble and unsteady steps, and going to the window pulled aside the olive velvet curtains.
The twilight had fallen and the sky was pale to colourlessness; low on the horizon, beyond the river, sombre banks of clouds were rising, and at the edge of them, floating free in the purity of the sky, was the evening star, sparkling with the frosty light of Northern climes.
The King fixed his eyes on this star, but without hope of comfort; cold and disdainful seemed star and heavens, and God pitiless and very far away behind the storm-clouds.
There was no command, no excuse, no reproof for him from on High; in his own heart the decision must be and now—at once—within the next hour. At that moment life seemed unutterably hateful to the King; everything in the world, even the figure of his wife, he viewed with a touch of sick disgust; the taint of what he was about to do was already over him, his life was already stained with baseness, his happiness corrupted.
He knew, as he stared at the icy star that was already being veiled by the on-rushing vapours of the rain-cloud, that he would abandon Strafford.