"As to myself, your lordship can have no farther anxiety; but I wish your
lordship's endeavours to detect and bring proofs home to the guilty may
be promptly successful--for the gratification of your own feelings, and
the satisfaction of the public mind, before the matter should be brought
forward in parliament."

His majesty bowed, and as Lord Oldborough retired, he added some gracious
phrases, expressive of the high esteem he felt for the minister, and
the interest he had always, and should always take, in whatever could
contribute to his public and private--_satisfaction_--(again).

To an eye and ear less practised in courts than this minister's, all that
had been said would have been really satisfactory: but Lord Oldborough
discerned a secret embarrassment in the smile, a constraint in the manner,
a care, an effort to be gracious in the language, a caution, a rounding of
the periods, a recurrence to technical phrases of compliment and amity, a
want of the free fluent language of the heart; language which, as it flows,
whether from sovereign or subject, leaves a trace that the art of courtier
or of monarch cannot imitate. In all attempts at such imitation, there is a
want, of which vanity and even interest is not always sensible, but which
feeling perceives instantly. Lord Oldborough felt it--and twice, during
this audience, he was on the point of offering his resignation, and twice,
exerting strong power over himself, he refrained.

He saw plainly that he was not where he had been in the king's confidence;
that his enemies had been at work, and, in some measure, had succeeded;
that suspicions had been infused into the king's mind. That his king had
doubted him, his majesty had confessed--and Lord Oldborough discerned that
there was no genuine joy at the moment his majesty was undeceived, no real
anxiety for his honour, only the ostensible manifestation suitable to the