waxed wood of the floor; her hood fell behind to
the ground, and her fair hair was golden where the sunlight fell on it
with a last, watery ray.

Upon Privy Seal she raised her eyes; she bent her knees so that her
gown spread out all around her when she curtsied, and, having arranged
it with a slow hand, she came to her height again, rustling as if she
rose from a wave.

'Sir,' she said, 'I come to pray you to right a great wrong done by
your servants.'

'By God!' Wriothesley said, 'she speaks high words.'

'Madam Howard,' Cromwell answered--and his eyes graciously dwelt upon
her tall form. She had clasped her hands before her lap and looked
into his face. 'Madam Howard, you are more learned in the better
letters than I; but I would have you call to memory one Pancrates, of
whom telleth Lucian. Being in a desert or elsewhere, this magician
could turn sticks, stocks and stakes into servants that did his will.
Mark you, they did his will--no more and no less.'

'Sir,' Katharine said, 'ye have better servants than ever had
Pancrates. They do more than your behests.'

Cromwell bent his back, stretched aside his white hand and smiled
still.

'Ye trow truth,' he said. 'Yet ye do me wrong; for had I the servants
of Pancrates, assuredly he should hear no groans of injustice from men
of good will.'

'It is too good hearing,' Katharine said gravely. 'This is my
tale----'

Once before she had trembled in this man's presence, and still she had
a catching in the throat as her eyes measured his face. She was mad to
do right and to right wrongs, yet in his presence the doing of the
right, the righting of wrongs, seemed less easy than when she stood
before any other man. 'Sir,' she uttered, 'I have thought ye have done
ill afore now. I am nowise certain that ye thought your ill-doing an
evil. I beseech you for a patient hearing.'

But, though she told her story well--and it was an old story that she
had learned by heart--she could not be rid of the feeling that this
was a less easy matter than it had seemed to her, to call Cromwell
accursed. She had a moving tale of wrongs done by Cromwell's servant,
Dr Barnes, a visitor of a church in Lincolnshire near where her home
had been. For the lands had been taken from a little priory upon an
excuse that the nuns lived a lewd life; and so well had she known the
nuns, going in and out of the convent every week-day, that well she
knew the falseness of Cromwell's servant's tale.