"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since
she did cry out."

Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he
desired of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's
movements, and the fullest particulars of his private life.

Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful
agents of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green
with the Queen. For he intended to return upon one pretext or
another before very long, and complete the conquest. Those agents
of his were Lord Holland and the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is
to be presumed that they served the Duke's interests well, and it
is no less to be presumed from that which followed that they
found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly
romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life,
touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in
which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was
away, overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there
could be little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had
inspired.

So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--
as La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the
Duke a trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That
love-token--for it amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to
England, and delivered to the Duke.