d before the
aperture smiling.

'Ye came to ask a boon of me,' he said. 'Is it your will still that I
grant it?'

'Sir,' she answered, 'I asked a boon of you that I thought you would
not grant, so that I might go to the King and shew him your evil
dealings with his lieges.'

'I knew it well,' he said. 'But the King will not cast me down till
the King hath had full use of me.'

'You have a very great sight into men's minds,' she uttered, and he
laughed noiselessly once again.

'I am as God made me,' he said. Then he spoke once more. 'I will read
your mind if you will. Ye came to me in this crisis, thinking with
yourself: _Liars go unto the King saying, "This Cromwell is a traitor;
cast him down, for he seeks your ill." I will go unto the King saying,
"This Cromwell grindeth the faces of the poor and beareth false
witness. Cast him down, though he serve you well, since he maketh your
name to stink to heaven."_ So I read my fellow-men.'

'Sir,' she said, 'it is very true that I will not be linked with
liars. And it is very true that men do so speak of you to the King's
Highness.'

'Why,' he answered her debonairly, 'the King shall listen neither to
them nor to you till the day be come. Then he will act in his own good
way--upon the pretext that I be a traitor, or upon the pretext that I
have borne false witness, or upon no pretext at all.'

'Nevertheless will I speak for the truth that shall prevail,' she
answered.

'Why, God help you!' was his rejoinder.

* * * * *

Going back to his friends in the window Cromwell meditated that it was
possible to imagine a woman that thought so simply; yet it was
impossible to imagine one that should be able to act with so great a
simplicity. On the one hand, if she stayed about the King she should
be his safeguard, for it was very certain that she should not tell the
King that he was a traitor. And that above all was what Cromwell had
to fear. He had, for his own purposes, so filled the King with the
belief that treachery overran his land, that the King saw treachery in
every man. And Cromwell was aware, well enough, that such of his
adherents as were Protestant--such men as Wriothesley--had indeed
boasted that they were twenty thousand swords ready to fall upon even
the King if he set against the re-forming religion in England. This
was the greatest danger that he had--that an enemy of his should tell
the King that Privy Seal had behind hi