"
"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,"
quoth he.
"Pray do. The cards are here."
"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But
such is not the castle I'll build you if you command me."
"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
surely."
"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes
were oddly ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"
Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen
must prove a prison."
She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome,
scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine
looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her." She
was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double
meaning to her speech. "Shall we go see how she is faring?" she
added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also
doubted.
He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially
with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic
urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was
no more than a mask upon his chagrin.
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