yon cast her eyes on the ground, and said that it was such
pleasure to attend her mistress, that not willingly would she give up
that discoiffing, undoing of hair, and all the rest, for long she had
desired to have the handling of these precious things and costly
garments.

'No, you shall get you gone,' the Queen said, 'for I will not have you,
sweetheart, be red-lidded in the morning with this long watching, for
to-morrow the King comes, and I will have him see my women comely and
fair, though in your love you will not care for yourselves.'

Standing before her mirror, where there burned in silver dishes four
tall candles with perfumed wicks, Katharine offered her back to the
loosening fingers of this girl.

'I would not have you to think,' she said, 'that I am always thus late
and a gadabout. But this day'--the Queen's eyes sparkled, and her cheeks
were red with exaltation--'this day and this night are one that shall be
marked with red stones in the calendar of England, and late have I
travailed so to make them be.'

The girl was very black-avised, and her face beneath her grey hood--for
the Queen's maids were all in grey, with crowned roses, the device that
the King had given her at their wedding, worked in red silk on each
shoulder--her face beneath her grey hood was the clear shape of the thin
end of an egg. She worked at the unlacing of the Queen's gown, so that
she at last must kneel down to it.

Having finished, she remained upon her knees, but she twisted her
fingers in her skirt as if she were bashful, yet her face was perturbed
with red flushes on the dark cheeks.

The Queen, feeling that she knelt there upon her loosened gown and did
not get her gone, said--

'Anan?'

'Please you let me stay,' the girl said; but Katharine answered--

'I would commune with my own thoughts.'

'Please you hear me,' the girl said, and she was very earnest; but the
Queen answered--

'Why, no! If you have any boon to ask of me, you know very well that
to-morrow at eleven is the hour for asking. Now, I will sit still with
the silence. Bring me my chair to the table. The Lady Rochford shall put
out my lights when I be abed.'

The girl stood up and rolled, with a trick of appeal, her eyes to the
old Lady Rochford. This lady, all in grey too, but with a great white
hood because she was a widow, sat back upon the foot of the great bed.
Her face was perturbed, but it had been always perturbed since her
cousin, the Queen