e her
father's house?'

'Then advance the springald to some post away from you,' the Lady Cicely
said.

'Nay,' the Queen answered; 'he hath done nothing to merit advancement.'

She continued, with her head bent down over the writing on her knee, her
lips moving a little as, sedulously, she drew large and plain letters
with her pen.

'By Heaven,' the Lady Cicely said, 'you have too tickle a conscience to
be a Queen of this world and day. In the time of Caesar you might have
lived more easily.'

The Queen looked up at her from her writing; her clear eyes were
untroubled.

'Aye,' she said. '_Lucio Domitio, Appio Claudio consulibus_----'

Cicely Rochford set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.

'Aye, your Highness is a Roman,' she tittered like a magpie.

'In the day of Caesar it was simple to do well,' the Queen said.

'Why, I do not believe it,' Cicely answered her.

'Cousin! Cousin!' The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the
Queen, not her old playmate.

'But now,' the Queen said, 'with such a coming together and a concourse
of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court----'
She paused and sighed.

'Well, if I may not speak my mind,' Cicely Rochford said to the old
lady, 'what good am I?'

'I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that
wolf Magister,' the Queen said. 'I take shame to myself that I did no
more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be
degenerate days.'

'Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,' Cicely Rochford said. 'I am very
certain that in the days of your noble Romans it was as it is now. Tell
me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not
upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say
that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of
advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I
have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at
Court.'

'Why,' the Queen said, 'the days of Plautus were days degenerated and
fallen already from the ancient nobleness.'

'You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,' Cicely Rochford
mocked her. 'If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.'

She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound
like '_Pfui!_' Then she said quickly--

'Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over
familiar like the boy with the pikestaff