girl's back, 'if you have any love for the green and fertile land
that gave birth both to you and to me----'

'But to me a bastard,' the Lady Mary said.

'If you would have the dishoused saints to return home to their loved
pastures; if you would have the Mother of God and of us all to rejoice
again in her dowry; if you would see a great multitude of souls, gentle
and simple reconducted again towards Heaven----'

'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said; 'grovel! grovel! I had thought you
would have been shamed thus to crawl upon your belly before me.'

'I would crawl in the dust,' Katharine said. 'I would kiss the mire from
the shoon of the vilest man there is if in that way I might win for the
Church of God----'

'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said.

'You will not let me finish my speech about our Saviour and His mother,'
the Queen said. 'You are afraid I should move you.'

The Lady Mary turned suddenly round upon her in her chair. Her face was
pallid, the skin upon her hollowed temples trembled--

'Queen,' she called out, 'ye blaspheme when ye say that a few paltry
speeches of yours about God and souls will make me fail my mother's
memory and the remembrances of the shames I have had.'

She closed her eyes; she swallowed in her throat and then, starting up,
she overset her chair.

'To save souls!' she said. 'To save a few craven English souls! What are
they to me? Let them burn in the eternal fires! Who among them raised a
hand or struck a blow for my mother or me? Let them go shivering to
hell.'

'Lady,' the Queen said, 'ye know well how many have gone to the stake
over conspiracies for you in this realm.'

'Then they are dead and wear the martyr's crown,' the Lady Mary said.
'Let the rest that never aided me, nor struck blow for my mother, go rot
in their heresies.'

'But the Church of God!' the Queen said. 'The King's Highness has
promised me that upon the hour when you shall swear to do these things
he will send the letter that ye wot of to our Father in Rome.'

The Lady Mary laughed aloud--

'Here is a fine woman,' she said. 'This is ever the woman's part to
gloss over crimes of their men folk. What say you to the death of Lady
Salisbury that died by the block a little since?'

She bent her body and poked her head forward into the Queen's very face.
Katharine stood still before her.

'God knows,' she said. 'I might not stay it. There was much false
witness--or some of it true--against her. I pray that