he kept at first at a distance from her, and but looked on with this
secret exultant glow in his bad, beauteous eyes, told her that at last he
felt he held some power in his hands, against which all her defiance
would be as naught. Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when
alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she
had never flinched. Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his
baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew she had
never reached.

At midnight, having just made obeisance before Royalty retiring, she felt
that at length he had drawn near and was standing at her side.

"To-night," he said, in the low undertone it was his way to keep for such
occasions, knowing how he could pierce her ear--"to-night you are Juno's
self--a very Queen of Heaven!"

She made no answer.

"And I have stood and watched you moving among all lesser goddesses as
the moon sails among the stars, and I have smiled in thinking of what
these lesser deities would say if they had known what I bear in my breast
to-night."

She did not even make a movement--in truth, she felt that at his next
words she might change to stone.

"I have found it," he said--"I have it here--the lost treasure--the tress
of hair like a raven's wing and six feet long. Is there another woman in
England who could give a man a lock like it?"