she had done, but she had heard of man’s pretense in order to cozen woman out of her favors, and she began to think she had been deceived.  To her the logic seemed irresistible; that if the same motive lived in his heart, and prompted him, that burned in her breast, and induced her, who was virgin to her very heart-core, and whose hand had hardly before been touched by the hand of man, to give so much, no power of prudence could keep him away from her.  So she concluded she had given her gold for his dross.  This conclusion was more easily arrived at owing to the fact that she had never been entirely sure of the state of his heart.  There had always been a love-exciting grain of doubt; and when the thought came to her that she had been obliged to ask him to tell her of his affection, and that the advances had really all been made by her, that confirmed her suspicions.  It seemed only too clear that she had been too quick to give—­no very comforting thought to a proud girl, even though a mistaken one.

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As the days went by and Brandon did not come, her anger cooled, as usual, and again her heart began to ache; but her sense of injury grew stronger day by day, and she thought she was, beyond a doubt, the most ill-used of women.

The other matter I wish to tell you is, that the negotiations for Mary’s marriage with old Louis XII of France were beginning to be an open secret about the court.  The Duc de Longueville, who had been held by Henry for some time as a sort of hostage from the French king, had opened negotiations by inflaming the flickering passions of old Louis with descriptions of Mary’s beauty.  As there was a prospect of a new emperor soon, and as the imperial bee had of late been making a most vehement buzzing in Henry’s bonnet, he encouraged de Longueville, and thought it would be a good time to purchase the help of France at the cost of his beautiful sister and a handsome dower.  Mary, of course, had not been consulted, and although she had coaxed her brother out of other marriage projects, Henry had gone about this as if he were in earnest, and it was thought throughout the court that Mary’s coaxings would be all in vain—­a fear which she herself had begun to share, notwithstanding her usual self-confidence.

She hated the thought of the marriage, and dreaded it as she would death itself, though she said nothing to any one but Jane, and was holding her forces in reserve for the grand attack.  She was preparing the way by being very sweet and kind to Henry.

Now, all of this, coming upon the heels of her trouble with Brandon, made her most wretched indeed.  For the first time in her life she began to feel suffering; that great broadener, in fact, maker, of human character.