“I believe thee, boy!  I do believe thee!  I would mistrust myself ere I mistrusted thee.  We will hear of thy doings to-morrow.  Enough now to know we are well satisfied with thy government in Sicily, and trust our native subject who succeeds thee will do his part as well.  Away to thy seat, and rejoice that thou hast arrived ere this gay scene has closed.  Yet stay:  our lovely hostess hath not yet given thee welcome.  Where is the Senora?  Isabella, hast thou spirited her hence?  She was here but now.”

“Nay, good my Lord:  she has vanished unwittingly,” replied Isabella, as she turned towards the spot where Marie had been standing.  “Don Ferdinand, we must entreat thee to recall her!”

“It needs not, royal Madam:  I am here:”  and Marie stepped forward from the deep shade of the falling drapery behind the royal seats which had concealed her, and stood calmly, almost proudly erect beside the Queen, the full light falling on her face and form.  But there was little need for light to recognize her:  the voice was sufficient; and even the vivid consciousness of where he stood, the hundred curious eyes upon him, could not restrain the sudden start—­the bewildered look.  Could that be Marie?  Could that be the wife of Ferdinand Morales?  If she were the one, how could she be the other, when scarcely eighteen months previous, she had told him that which, if it were true, must equally prevent her union with Morales as with himself?  In what were they different save in the vast superiority of wealth and rank?  And in the chaos of bewildering emotions, so trustful was he in the truth of her he loved, that, against the very evidence of his own senses, he for the moment disbelieved in the identity of the wife of Morales with the Marie Henriquez of the Cedar Vale.  Perhaps it was well he did so, for it enabled him to still the tumultuous throbbing of his every pulse as her voice again sounded in his ear, saying he was welcome, most welcome as her husband’s friend, and to retire without any apparent emotion to his seat.

He had merely bowed reverentially in reply.  In any other person the silence itself would have caused remark:  but for the last three years Stanley’s reserve and silence in the company of women had been such, that a departure from his general rule even in the present case would have been more noticed than his silence.  Thoughts of painful, almost chaotic bewilderment indeed, so chased each other across his mind as to render the scene around him indistinct, the many faces and eager voices like the phantasma of a dream.  But the pride of manhood roused him from the sickening trance, and urged him to enter into the details, called for by his companions in arms, of the revolt of the Sicilians, with even more than usual animation.

One timid glance Marie had hazarded towards her husband, and it was met by such a look and smile of love and pride that she was re-assured to perform the duties of the evening unfalteringly to the end.  Alas! she little knew that her momentary emotion and that of Arthur had alike been seen, commented upon, and welcomed with fiend-like glee, as the connecting link of an until then impalpable plot, by one individual in that courtly crowd, whose presence, hateful as it was, she had forgotten in the new and happier thoughts which Isabella’s presence and notice had occasioned.