give audience to a messenger from the Emperor.
'Moreover,' added Edmund disconsolately, 'to-morrow he is going to St.
Albans for a week's penitence. Harry is always doing penance, I cannot
think what for. He never eats marchpane in church--nor rolls balls
there.'

'I know,' said Jasper sagely. 'I heard the Lord Cardinal rating him for
being false to his betrothed--that's the Lady Margaret, you know.'

'Ha!' said the Duke of York, before whom the two little boys were
standing. 'How was that, my little man?'

'Hush, Jasper,' said Edmund; 'you do not know.'

'But I do, Edmund; I was in the window all the time. Harry said he did
not know it, he only meant all courtesy; and then the Lord Cardinal
asked him if he called it loyalty to his betrothed to be playing the
fool with the Scottish wench. And then Harry stared--like thee, Ned,
when thy bolt had hit the Lady of Suffolk: and my Lord went on to say
that it was perilous to play the fool with a king's sister, and his own
niece. Then, for all that Harry is a king and a man grown, he wept like
Owen, only not loud, and he went down on his knees, and he cried, "Mea
peccata, mea peccata, mea infirmitas," just as he taught me to do at
confession. And then he said he would do whatever the Lord Cardinal
thought fit, and go and do penance at St. Albans, if he pleased, and not
see the lady that sings any more.'

'And I say,' exclaimed Edmund, 'what's the good of being a king and a
man, if one is to be rated like a babe?'

'So say I, my little man,' returned the Duke, patting him on the head,
then adding to his own two boys, 'Take your cousins and play ball with
them, or spin tops, or whatever may please them.'

'There is the king we have,' quoth Richard Nevil 'to be at the beck of
any misproud priest, and bewail with tears a moment's following of his
own will, like other men.'

Most of the company felt such misplaced penitence and submission, as
they deemed it, beneath contempt; but while Eleanor had pride enough to
hold up her head so that no one might suppose her to be disappointed,
she felt a strange awe of the conscientiousness that repented when
others would only have felt resentment--relief, perhaps, at not again
coming into contact with one so unlike other men as almost to alarm her.

Jean tossed up her head, and declared that her brother knew better than
to let any bishop put him into leading-strings. By and by there was a
great outcry among the children, and Edmund