distractingly. She fetched a sigh.

"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen
must prove a prison."

She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome,
scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine
looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her." She
was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double
meaning to her speech. "Shall we go see how she is faring?" she
added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also
doubted.

He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially
with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic
urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was
no more than a mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that
pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him
and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly
simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.

"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
prove a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to
queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?

It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew
there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon,
which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the
grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of
Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the King's divorce.