That night as he drove homeward after an interview with the Queen at Kensington his coach rolled through a street where was a great house standing alone in a square garden.  ’Twas a house well known for its size and massive beauty, and he leaned forward to glance at it, for no other reason than his remembrance that it was the home of his lordship of Dunstanwolde, that fact, in connection with the incident of the morning, wakening in him a vague interest.

“’Tis there she reigns Queen,” he said, “with her old lord worshipping at her feet as old lords will at the feet of young wives and beauties.  Poor gentleman—­though she is kind to him, they say.  But if ’twere the other man—­Good God!” As he uttered the exclamation he drew back within the coach.  ’Twas long past midnight and the lights of Dunstanwolde House were extinguished, but in the dark on the opposite side of the street there walked a tall figure wrapped in a long cloak.

“There is no other gentleman of such inches and so straight,” his Grace said.  “Good Lord! how a man can suffer in such case, and how we are all alike—­schoolboys, scullions, or Dukes—­and must writhe and yearn and feel we are driven mad, and can find no help but only to follow and look at her, yards away, or crush to one’s lips a rag of ribband or a flower, or pace the night away before her darkened house while she lies asleep.  He is the finest man-thing I have ever known—­and yet there is no other way for him—­and he will walk there half the night, his throat full of mad sobs, which he does not know for sobs, because he is not woman but tortured man.”

Many a night the same figure had walked there in the darkness.  As his great friend had said, there was no other way.  His pain had grown no less, but only more as the months passed by, for it was not the common pain of a man like others.  As he was taller, stronger, and had more brain and heart than most, he had greater and keener pangs to do battle with, and in the world he must at intervals be thrown across her path and she across his, and as he had been haunted by talk and rumours of her in the years before he was haunted now.  ’Twas but natural all should praise to him his kinsman’s wife, sure that he would feel pleasure when he heard her lauded.

Women, especially such as are great ladies, have not at their command, if they hide pain in secret, even the refuges and poor comforts possessed by men.  They may not feed their hungry souls by gazing at a distance upon the beloved object of their heavy thoughts; they cannot pace the night through before a dwelling, looking up as they pass at the darkened windows behind which sleeps—­or wakes—­the creature their hearts cry to in their pain; tears leave traces; faces from which smiles are absent, eyes from which light has fled, arouse query and comment.  My lord has a certain privacy and license to be dull or gloomy, but my lady cannot well be either without explaining herself, either by calling in a physician or wearing mourning, or allowing the world to gain some hint of domestic trouble or misfortune.