on and trade of a spy was
so little esteemed--it had been far other with the great informers of
Privy Seal's day--that these men, being of the Queen's guard, would talk
roughly to Lascelles, who was a mere poor gentleman of the Archbishop's
if his other vocation could be neglected. Lascelles sat, his hand upon
his chin.

'You use him very roughly if this be the Queen's cousin,' he said.

The bearer set back his beard and laughed at the sky.

'This is a coif--a poor rag of a merchant,' he cried out. 'If this were
the Queen's cousin should we bear him thus on a clout?'

'I am the Queen's cousin, T. Culpepper,' Culpepper shouted at the sky.
'Who be you that stay me from her?'

'Why, you may hear plainly,' the bearer said. 'He is mazed, doited,
starved, thirsted, and a seer of visions.'

Lascelles pondered, his elbow upon his saddle-peak, his chin caught in
his hand.

'How came ye by him?' he asked.

One with another they told him the tale, how, the Queen being ridden
towards the north parts, at the extreme end of her ride had seen the
man, at a distance, among the heather, flogging a dead horse with a
moorland kern beside him. He was a robbed, parched, fevered, and amazed
traveller. The Queen's Highness, compassionating, had bidden bear him to
the castle and comfort and cure him, not having looked upon his face or
heard his tongue. For, for sure then, she had let him die where he was;
since, no sooner were these four, his new bearers, nearly come up among
the knee-deep heather, than this man had started up, his eyes upon the
Queen's cavalcade and many at a distance. And, with his sword drawn and
screaming, he had cried out that, if that was the Queen, he was the
Queen's cousin. They had tripped up his heels in a bed of ling and
quieted him with a clout on the poll from an axe end.

'But now we have him here,' the eldest said; 'where we shall bestow him
we know not.'

Lascelles had his eyes upon the sick man's face as if it fascinated him,
and, slowly, he got down from his horse. Culpepper then lay very still
with his eyes closed, but his breast heaved as though against tight and
strong ropes that bound him.

'I think I do know this gentleman for one John Robb,' he said. 'Are you
very certain the Queen's Highness did not know his face?'

'Why, she came not ever within a quarter mile of him,' the bearer said.

'Then it is a great charity of the Queen to show mercy to a man she hath
never seen,' Lascelles answ