have treated her as a victim, and disdained her humiliation and grief;
magnificent, powerful, rich, in fullest beauty, and disdaining himself,
she filled him with a mad passion of love which was strangely mixed with
hatred and cruelty. To see her surrounded by her worshippers, courted by
the Court itself, all eyes drawn towards her as she moved, all hearts
laid at her feet, was torture to him. In such cases as his and hers, it
was the woman who should sue for love's return, and watch the averted
face, longing for the moment when it would deign to turn and she could
catch the cold eye and plead piteously with her own. This he had seen;
this, men like himself, but older, had taught him with vicious art; but
here was a woman who had scorned him at the hour which should have been
the moment of his greatest powerfulness, who had mocked at and lashed him
in the face with the high derision of a creature above law, and who never
for one instant had bent her neck to the yoke which women must bear. She
had laughed it to scorn--and him--and all things--and gone on her way,
crowned with her scarlet roses, to wealth, and rank, and power, and
adulation; while he--the man, whose right it was to be transgressor--had
fallen upon hard fortune, and was losing step by step all she had won. In
his way he loved her madly--as he had loved her before, and as he would
have loved any woman who embodied triumph and beauty; and burning with
desire for both, and with jealous rage of all, he swore he would not be
outdone, befooled, cast aside, and trampled on.

At the playhouse when she looked from her box, she saw him leaning
against some pillar or stationed in some noticeable spot, his bold blue
eyes fixed burningly upon her; at fashionable assemblies he made his way
to her side and stood near her, gazing, or dropping words into her ear;
at church he placed himself in some pew near by, that she and all the
world might behold him; when she left her coach and walked in the Mall he
joined her or walked behind. At such times in my lady's close-fringed