King's
Highness' ears.'

'What way?' the Archbishop said heavily, as if the thing were
impossible. His gentleman answered--

'This way and that!' The King's Highness had a trick of wandering about
among his faithful lieges unbeknown; foreign ambassadors wrote abroad
such rumours which might be re-reported from the foreign by the King's
servants.

'Such a report,' Lascelles said, 'hath gone up already to London town by
a swift carrier.'

The Archbishop brought out wearily and distastefully--

'How know you? Was it you that wrote it?'

'Please it, your Grace,' his gentleman answered him, 'it was in this
wise. As I was passing by the Queen's chamber wall I heard a great
outcry----'

He laid down his pen beside his writing-board the more leisurely to
speak.

He had seen Udal, beaten and shaking, stagger out from the Queen's door
to where his guards waited to set him back in prison. From Udal he had
learned of this new draft of the letter; of Udal's trouble he knew
before. Udal gone, he had waited a little, hearing the Queen's voice and
what she said very plainly, for the castle was very great and quiet.
Then out had come the young Poins, breathing like a volcano through his
nostrils, and like to be stricken with palsy, boy though he was. Him
Lascelles had followed at a convenient distance, where he staggered and
snorted. And, coming upon the boy in an empty guard-room near the great
gate, he had found him aflame with passion against the Queen's
Highness.

'I,' the boy had cried out, 'I that by my carrying of letters set this
Howard where she sits! I!--and this is my advancement. My sister cast
down, and I cast out, and another maid to take my sister's place.'

And Lascelles, in the guard-chamber, had shown him sympathy and reminded
him that there was gospel for saying that princes had short memories.

'But I did not calm him!' Lascelles said.

On the contrary, upon Lascelles' suggestion that the boy had but to hold
his tongue and pocket his wrongs, the young Poins had burst out that he
would shout it all abroad at every street corner. And suddenly it had
come into his head to write such a letter to his Uncle Badge the printer
as, printed in a broadside, would make the Queen's name to stink, until
the last generation was of men, in men's nostrils.

Lascelles rubbed his hands gently and sinuously together. He cast one
sly glance at the Archbishop.

'Well, the letter was written,' he said. 'Be sure the broad