women--as you have sown the air with the dust of the passion which you
call love. Oh, you never knew what love meant, my lord! I doubt if,
when you lay in your mother's arms, you turned to her with love. You
never did one kindly act for love, no generous thought was ever born in
you by love. Sir, I know it as though it were written in a book; your
life has been one long calculation--your sympathy or kindness a
calculated thing. Good-nature, emotion you may have had, but never the
divine thing by which the world is saved. Were there but one little
place where that Eden flower might bloom within your heart, you could not
seek to ruin that love which lives in mine and fills it, conquering all
the lesser part of me. I never knew of how much love I was capable until
I heard you speak today. Out of your life's experience, out of all that
you have learned of women good and evil, you--for a selfish, miserable
purpose--would put the gyves upon my wrists, make me a pawn in your dark
game; a pawn which you would lose without a thought as the game went on.

"If you must fight, my lord, if you must ruin Monsieur de la Foret and a
poor Huguenot girl, do it by greater means than this. You have power,
you say. Use it then; destroy us, if you will. Send us to the Medici:
bring us to the block, murder us--that were no new thing to Lord
Leicester. But do not stoop to treachery and falsehood to thrust us
down. Oh, you have made me see the depths of shame to-day! But yet,"
her voice suddenly changed, a note of plaintive force filled it--"I have
learned much this hour--more than I ever knew. Perhaps it is that we
come to knowledge only through fire and tears." She smiled sadly.
"I suppose that sometime some day, this page of life would have scorched
my sight. Oh, my lord, what was there in me that you dared speak so to
me? Was there naught to have stayed your tongue and stemmed the tide in
which you would engulf me?" He had listened as in a dream at first. She
had read him as he might read himself, had revealed him with the certain