ut up his hand to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips
writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have
expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the peak of it.

'Please it, your Grace,' he said, 'this is no vanity, but a scheme that
I will try.'

'What scheme? What scheme?' the Archbishop said. 'Here have been too
many schemes.' He was very shaken and afraid, because this world was
beyond his control.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles answered, 'ask me not what this
scheme is.'

The Archbishop shook his head and pursed his lips feebly.

'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles urged, 'if this scheme miscarry, your
Grace shall hear no more of it. If this scheme succeed I trow it shall
help some things forward that your Grace would much have forwarded.
Please it, your Grace, to ask me no more, and to send me with this
letter to the Queen's Highness.'

The Archbishop opened his nerveless hands before him; they were pale and
wrinkled as if they had been much soddened in water. Since the King had
bidden him compose that letter to the Pope of Rome, his hands had grown
so. Lascelles wrote on at the new draft of the letter, his lips
following the motions of his pen. Still writing, and with his eyes down,
he said--

'The Queen's Highness will put from her her tirewoman in a week from
now.'

The Archbishop moved his fingers as who should say--

'What is that to me!' His eyes gazed into the space above his book that
lay before him on the table.

'This Margot Poins is a niece of the master-printer Badge, a Lutheran,
of the Austin Friars.' Lascelles pursued his writing for a line further.
Then he added--

'This putting away and the occasion of it shall make a great noise in
the town of London. It will be said amongst the Lutherans that the Queen
is answerable therefor. It will be said that the Queen hath a very lewd
Court and companionship.'

The Archbishop muttered wearily--

'It hath been said already.'

'But not,' Lascelles said, 'since she came to be Queen.'

The Archbishop directed upon him his hang-dog eyes, and his voice was
the voice of a man that would not be disturbed from woeful musings.

'What use?' he said bitterly; and then again, 'What use?'

Lascelles wrote on sedulously. He used his sandarach to the end of the
page, blew off the sand, eyed the sheet sideways, laid it down, and set
another on his writing-board.

'Why,' he brought out quietly, 'it may be brought to the