y the good King, her lord and master,
to let this priest be made her confessor whilst there they stayed. And
afterwards, if it were convenient, in reward for his faithfulness, he
should be made a prior or a bishop in those parts. So the moorsmen,
blessing her uncouthly for her fairness and kind words, went back with
their furs and bows into their fastnesses. One of them was a great lord
of that countryside, and each day he sent into the castle bucks and moor
fowl, and once or twice a wolf. His name was Sir John Peel, and Sir John
Peel, too, the priest was called.

So the priest served that little altar, and of a night, when the Queen
was minded next day to partake of the host, he heard her confession. On
other nights he left them there alone to say their prayers. It was
always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and
two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black
and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that
blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns
that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at
their sides and vanished up into the darkness of the roof.

Having done their prayers, sometimes they stayed to converse and to
meditate, for there they could be very private. On the night when the
letter to Rome was redrafted, the Queen prayed much longer than the Lady
Mary, who sat back upon a stool, silently, to await her finishing--for
it seemed that the Queen was more zealous for the converting of those
realms again to the old faith than was ever the Lady Mary. The tapers
burned with a steady, invisible glow in the little side chapel behind
the pillar; the altar gleamed duskily before them, and it was so still
that through the unglassed windows they could hear, from far below in
the black countryside, a tenuous bleating of late-dropped lambs.
Katharine Howard's beads clicked and her dress rustled as she came up
from her knees.

'It rests more with thee than with any other in this land,' her voice
reverberated amongst the distant shadows. A bat that had been drawn in
by the light flittered invisibly near them.

'Even what?' the Lady Mary asked.

'Well you know,' the Queen answered; 'and may the God to whom you have
prayed, that softened the heart of Paul, soften thine in this hour!'

The Lady Mary maintained a long silence. The bat flittered, with a
leathern rustle, invisible, between their very faces. At