heard the loud beating of his
heart. He stopped still. He 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 picture of innocence
and youth, that he did not see for some moments that the sleeper was not
alone. Suddenly an exclamation rose to his lips. He clenched his hand
in jealous agony; he approached; he bent over; he heard the regular
breathing which the dreams of guilt never know; and then, when he saw
that pure and interlaced embrace,--the serene yet somewhat melancholy
face of Sibyll, which seemed hueless as marble in the moonlight, bending
partially ov