fault of hers."

He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature
shrank from purchasing his desires at the price of so much
ignominy to the Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be
necessary to give the screw of temptation another turn or two.
And it was Miss Stewart herself who--in all innocence--supplied
what was required in that direction. Driven to bay by the
importunities of Charles, she announced at last that it was her
intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve herself from
the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine the
uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so
desperate had she been rendered that she would marry any
gentleman of fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have her in
honour.

You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to
bribe her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or
any title she coveted, offering her these things at the nation's
expense as freely and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into
her lap, or the collar of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he
had put about her neck. The offers were ineffectual, and Charles,
driven almost to distraction by such invulnerable virtue, might
now have yielded to the insidious whispers of divorce and re-
marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the game.

Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered