“I have climbed there many a time, Nurse Halsell,” he said, his brown eye opening, laughing, as it had a trick of doing.

“But this time was a grave one,” Mistress Halsell answered.  “We talked of grave things, and in my humble way I strove to play Chaplain and preach a sermon.  You had heard Grace and Alison gossip of King Charles and Madam Carwell and Nell Gwynne—­and would ask questions it was hard to answer.”

“I remember well,” said my lord Duke, the light of memory in his eye, and he added, as one who reflects, “He is the King—­he is the King!”

“You remember!” said Nurse Halsell, her old eyes glowing.  “I have never forgot, and your Grace’s little face so lost in thought, as you looked out at the sky.”

“I have remembered it,” said his Grace, “in many a hard hour such as comes in all men’s lives.”

“You have known some such?” said the old woman, and of a sudden, as she gazed at him, it seemed as if such feeling overswept her as made her forget he was a great Duke and remember only her beauteous nurseling.  “Yes, you have known them, for I have sate here at the window and watched, and there have been days when my heart was like to break.”

He started and turned towards her.  Her deep eyes were full of tears which brimmed over and ran down her furrowed cheeks, and in them he saw a tender and wise knowledge of his nature’s self and all its pains—­a thing of which, before, he had never dreamed, for how could he have imagined that an old woman living alone could have so followed him with her heart that she had guessed his deepest secret; but this indeed she had, and her next words most touchingly revealed it.

“Being widowed and childless when I came to you,” she said, her emotion rising to a passion, “’twas as if you grew to be my own—­and in those summer days three years gone, life and love were strong in you—­life and love and youth.  And her eyes dared not turn to you, nor yours to her—­and I am a woman and was afraid—­for my man who died and left me widowed was my lover as well as my husband, and soul and body we had been one—­so I knew! But as I sate here and saw you as you passed below with your company, I said it to myself again and again, ’He is the King—­he is the King!’” And as his Grace rose from his seat, not angered, indeed, gazing at her tenderly, though growing pale, she seized his hand and kissed it, her tears falling.

“If ’tis unseemly,” she said, “forgive me, your Grace, forgive me; but I had sate here so long this very morning, and thought but of this thing—­and in the midst of my thinking came this woman, and she is from Gloucestershire, and told me of her ladyship of Dunstanwolde—­whose chariot passed her on the road, and she goes up to town, and rode radiant and blooming in rich colours, having cast her weeds aside and looking, so the woman said, like a beauteous creature new born, with all of life to come.”

CHAPTER XXIV