flung himself on a seat, and hid his face with his hands; then
starting up, he exclaimed, "No, no! I cannot shut out that sweet
face, those blue eyes from my gaze. They haunt me to my destruction
and her own. Yet why say destruction? If she love me, who shall know
the deed? If she love me not, will she dare to reveal her shame?
Shame!--nay, a king's embrace never dishonours. A king's bastard is a
House's pride. All is still,--the very moon vanishes from heaven.
The noiseless rushes in the gallery give no echo to the footstep. Fie
on me! Can a Plantagenet know fear?" He allowed himself no further
time to pause; he opened the door gently and stole along the gallery.
He knew well the chamber, for it was appointed by his command, and,
besides the usual door from the corridor, a small closet conducted to
a secret panel behind the arras. It was the apartment occupied, in
her visits to the court, by the queen's rival, the Lady Elizabeth
Lucy. He passed into the closet; he lifted the arras; he stood in
that chamber, which gratitude and chivalry and hospitable faith should
have made sacred as a shrine. And suddenly, as he entered, the moon,
before hid beneath a melancholy cloud, broke forth in awful splendour,
and her light rushed through the casement opposite his eye, and bathed
the room with the beams of a ghostlier day.

The abruptness of the solemn and mournful glory scared him as the
rebuking face of a living thing; a presence as if not of earth seemed
to interpose between the victim and the guilt. It was, however, but
for a moment that his step halted. He advanced: he drew aside the
folds of the curtain heavy with tissue of gold, and the sleeping face
of Anne lay hushed before him. It looked pale in the moonlight, but
ineffably serene, and the smile on its lips seemed still sweeter than
that which it wore awake. So fixed was his gaze, so ardently did his
whole heart and being feed through his eyes upon that exquisite