carry out that same evening after dark. He next sought his father,
and told him and his brother Charles the whole story; nor did he
find himself wrong in his expectation that the prospect of so good a
jest would go far to console the marquis for the annoyance of
finding that his household was not quite such a pattern one as he
had supposed. That there was anything of conspiracy or treachery
involved, he did not for a moment believe.

After dinner, while the horses were brought out, lord Herbert went
again to his wife's room. There was little Molly waiting to bid him
good-bye, and she sat upon his knee until it was time for him to go.
The child's looks made his heart sad, and his wife could not
restrain her tears when she saw him gaze upon her so mournfully. It
was with a heavy heart that, when the moment of departure came, he
rose, gave her into her mother's arms, clasped them both in one
embrace, and hurried from the room. He ought to be a noble king for
whom such men and women make such sacrifices.

To witness such devotion on the part of personages to whom she
looked up with such respect and confidence, would have been in
itself more than sufficient to secure for its object the
unquestioning partisanship of Dorothy; partisan already, it raised
her prejudice to a degree of worship which greatly narrowed what she
took for one of the widest gulfs separating her from the creed of
her friends. The favourite dogma of the school-master-king, the
offspring of his pride and weakness, had found fitting soil in
Dorothy. When, in the natural growth of the confidence reposed in
her by her protectors, she came to have some idea of the immensity
of the sums spent by them on behalf of his son, had, indeed, ere the
close of another year read the king's own handwriting and signature