, in her sorest need. His hand went to his breast
as he considered it, and remembered What he bore ... and he felt the
tiny flat circular case press upon his heart....

For his imagination was all aflame at the thought of Mary. Not only had
he been kindled again and again in the old days by poor Anthony's talk,
until the woman seemed to him half-deified already; but man after man
had repeated the same tale, that she was, in truth, that which her lean
cousin of England desired to be thought--a very paragon of women,
innocent, holy, undefiled, yet of charm to drive men to their knees
before her presence. It was said that she was as one of those strange
moths which, confined behind glass, will draw their mates out of the
darkness to beat themselves to death against her prison; she was
exquisite, they said, in her pale beauty, and yet more exquisite in her
pain; she exuded a faint and intoxicating perfume of womanliness, like a
crushed herb. Yet she was to be worshipped, rather than loved--a
sacrament to be approached kneeling, an incarnate breath of heaven, the
more lovely from the vileness into which her life had been cast and the
slanders that were about her name.... More marvellous than all was that
those who knew her best and longest loved her most; her servants wept or
groaned themselves into fevers if they were excluded from her too long;
of her as of the Wisdom of old might it be said that, "They who ate her
hungered yet, and they who drank her thirsted yet."... It was to this
miracle of humanity, then, that this priest was to come....

* * * * *

He sat up suddenly, once more pressing his hand to his breast, where his
Treasure lay hidden, as he heard steps crossing the paved hall outside.
Then he rose to his feet and bowed as a tall man came swiftly in,
followed by the apothecary.

II

It was a lean, harsh-faced man that he saw, long-moustached and
melancholy-eyed--"grim as a goose," as the physician had said--wearing,
even in this guarded household, a half-breast and cap of steel. A long
sword jingled beside him on the stone floor and clashed with his spurred
boots. He appeared the last man in the world to be the companion of a
sorrowing Queen; and it was precisely for this reason that he had been
chosen to replace the courtly lord Shrewsbury and the gentle Sir Ralph
Sadler. (Her Grace of England said that she had had enough of nurses for
gaolers.) His voice, too, resembled th