hasten faster than any
hired horse--so that ye may easily overtake a man that hath but two
hours' start towards Hampton.'

Whilst Poins was already hastening towards the gateway, Throckmorton
cried to him at a distance:

'Ask at each cross-road guard-house and at all ferries and bridges if
some have passed that way; and at the landing-stage if perchance
caballeros have altered their desires and had it in their minds to
take to boats.'

He sped through the wind to the riverside, set again his oars in
motion and swept up the tide. It had turned and they made good
progress.

VI

The Queen sat in her painted gallery at Richmond, and all around her
her maids sewed and span. The gallery was long; along the panels that
faced the windows were angels painted in red and blue and gold, and in
the three centre squares St. George, whose face was the face of the
King's Highness, in one issued from a yellow city upon a green plain;
in one with a cherry-coloured lance slew a green dragon from whose
mouth issued orange-coloured flames; and in one carried away, that he
might wed her in a rose-coloured tower on a hillside, a princess in a
black gown with hair painted of real gold.

Whilst the maids sewed in silence the Queen sat still upon a stool.
Light-skinned, not very stout, with a smooth oval face, she had laid
her folded hands on the gold and pearl embroidery of her lap and gazed
away into the distance, thinking. She sat so still that not even the
lawn tips of her wide hood with its invisible, minute sewings of
white, quivered. Her gown was of cloth of gold, but since her being in
England she had learned to wear a train, and in its folds on the
ground slept a small Italian greyhound. About her neck she had a
partelet set with green jewels and with pearls. Her maids sewed; the
spinning-wheels ate away the braided flax from the spindles, and the
sunlight poured down through the high windows. She was a very fair
woman then, and many that had seen her there sit had marvelled of the
King's disfavour for her; but she was accounted wondrous still,
sitting thus by the hour with the little hounds in the folds of her
dress. Only her eyes with their half-closed lids gave to her lost
gaze the appearance of a humour and irony that she never was heard to
voice.

They turned to the opening door, a flush came into her face, spread
slowly down her white neck and was lost in the white opening of her
shoulder-pieces, and she greeted Ka