CHAPTER XV

ULTIMATUM On the morrow Lady Essex wrote at length to Viscount Rochester, giving him the substance of that first and unloverlike interview with her bridegroom. 'No man of honour or of feeling,' she wrote, 'could deny a woman in such a matter'; and upon this she based her abiding confidence that Lord Essex would not deny her in the end. She closed with an appeal to her sweet Robin to love her as steadfastly as she loved him, who was constantly in her thoughts, and with a vow of fidelity, to be kept even at the cost …