the lips of scandal.

She found her tongue at last.

"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not necessary,
it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have
leave to go."

He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps
to the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so
indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and
reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes,
and hand on heart--

"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.

Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what
had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken
place under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip
wagging. An echo of it reached the King, together with the story of that
other business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the Duke of
Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against
the Queen, sought to feed the King's suspicions.

"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
Buckingham do to make her cry out?"

"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she did
cry out."

Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired
of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's movements, and the
fullest particulars of his private life.

Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents
of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen.
For he intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long,
and complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and
the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the
Duke's interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which
followed that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that
amazingly romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey
life, touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in which
pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was away, overseas;
she might never see him again; therefore there could be little harm in
indulging the romantic tenderness he had inspired.

So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier-