a man and a woman; and on
these he fixed his eyes as the boat swept up not twenty yards away, for
he knew who they must be.

The man was leaning back, looking gigantic in his puffed sleeves and
wide mantle; one great arm was flung along the back of the tapestried
seat, and his large head, capped with purple and feathers, was bending
towards the woman who sat beyond. Chris could make out a fringe of
reddish hair beneath his ear and at the back of the flat head between
the high collar and the cap. He caught a glimpse, too, of a sedate face
beyond, set on a slender neck, with downcast eyes and red lips. And then
as the boat came opposite, and the trumpeters sent out a brazen crash
from the trumpets at their lips, the man turned his head and stared
straight at the boat.

It was an immensely wide face, fringed with reddish hair, scanty about
the lips and more full below; and it looked the wider from the narrow
drooping eyes set near together and the small pursed mouth. Below, his
chin swelled down fold after fold into his collar, and the cheeks were
wide and heavy on either side.

It was the most powerful face that Chris had ever seen or dreamed
of--the animal brooded in every line and curve of it--it would have
been brutish but for the steady pale stare of the eyes and the tight
little lips. It fascinated and terrified him.

The flourish ended, the roar of the rowlocks sounded out again like the
beating of a furious heart; the King turned his head again and said
something, and the boat swept past.

Chris found that he had started to his feet, and sat down again,
breathing quickly and heavily, with a kind of indignant loathing that
was new to him.

This then was the master of England, the heart of all their
troubles--that gorgeous fat man with the broad pulpy face, in his
crimson and jewels; and that was his concubine who sat demure beside
him, with her white folded ringed hands on her lap, her beautiful eyes
cast down, and her lord's hot breath in her ear! It was these that were
purifying the Church of God of such men as the Cardinal-bishop in the
Tower, and the witty holy lawyer! It was by the will of such as these
that the heads of the Carthusian Fathers, bound brow and chin with
linen, stared up and down with dead eyes from the pikes overhead.

He sat panting and unseeing as the other boats swept past, full of the
King's friends all going down to Greenwich.

There broke out a roar from the Tower behind, and he