ut the same time a courier had been watched as he
rode off to London, bearing, it was rumoured, one last appeal from one
Queen to the other. On the other hand, it was known that Mary no longer
had her dais in her chamber, and that the billiard-table, which she
never used, had been taken away again.

But all this had happened before Christmas, and now a month had gone by,
and although this or that tale of discourtesy from gaoler to prisoner
leaked out through the servants; though it was known that the crucifix
which Mary had hung up in the place where her dais had stood remained
undisturbed--though this argument or the other could be advanced in turn
by men sitting over their wine in the taverns, that the Queen's cause
was rising or falling, nothing was truly known the one way or the other.
It had been proclaimed, by trumpet, in every town in England, that
sentence of death was passed; yet this was two or three months ago, and
the knowledge that the warrant had not yet been signed seemed an
argument to some that now it never would be.

* * * * *

A group was waiting (as a group usually did wait) at the village
entrance to the new bridge lately built by her Grace of England, towards
sunset on an evening late in January. This situation commanded, so far
as was possible, every point of interest. It was the beginning of the
London road, up which so many couriers had passed; it was over this
bridge that her Grace of Scotland herself had come from her
cross-country journey from Chartley. On the left, looking northwards,
rose the great old collegiate church, with its graceful lantern tower,
above the low thatched stone houses of the village; on the right,
adjoining the village beyond the big inn, rose the huge keep of the
castle and its walls, within its double moats, ranged in form of a
fetterlock of which the river itself was its straight side. Beyond, the
low rolling hills and meadows met the chilly January sky.

For four months now the village had been transformed into a kind of
camp. The castle itself was crammed to bursting. The row of little
windows beside the hall on the first floor, visible only from the road
that led past the inn parallel to the river, marked the lodgings of the
Queen, where, with the hall also for her use, she lived continually; the
rest of the castle was full of men-at-arms, officers, great lords who
came and went--these, with the castellan's rooms and those of his