gorgeous white flowers faint with fragrance, and at the slight retiring
figure of the woman who held them.

"Are these for the chapel, Madame?" he asked.

"No, Sir! For the Queen."

'For the Queen!' A quick sigh escaped him. He still stood, caught by a
sudden abstraction, looking at the dazzling whiteness of the snowy
blooms, and thinking how fittingly they would companion his beautiful,
cold, pure Queen Consort, who had never from her marriage day uttered a
word of love to him, or given him a glance of tenderness. Their rich
odours crept into his warm blood, and the bitter old sense of
unfulfilled longing, longing for affection, for comprehension, for all
that he had not possessed in his otherwise brilliant life, vexed and
sickened him. He turned away abruptly, and the lady-in-waiting, having
curtsied once more profoundly, passed on with her glistening sheaf of
bloom and disappeared vision-like in a gleam of azure light falling
through one of the further and higher casements. The King watched her
disappear, the meditative line of sadness still puckering his brow,
then, followed by his equerry, he entered a small private audience
chamber, where Sir Roger de Launay notified an attendant gentleman
usher that his Majesty was ready to receive Monsignor Del Fortis.

During the brief interval occupied in waiting for his visitor's
approach, the King selected certain papers from those which Sir Roger
had brought from the garden pavilion and placed them in order on the
table.

"For the past six months," he said "I have had this Jesuit's name