d shot out a little sound between a scream
and a sigh.

'Why, you are very affrighted,' the Queen said. 'One would think you
feared robbers; but my guards are too good.'

She began to unloosen from her hood her jewel, which was a rose
fashioned out of pink shell work set with huge dewdrops of diamonds and
crowned with a little crown of gold.

'God knows,' she said, 'I ha' trinkets enow for robbers. It takes me too
long to undo them. I would the King did not so load me.'

'Your Highness is too humble for a Queen,' the old Lady Rochford
grumbled. 'Let me aid you, since the maid is gone. I would not have you
speak your maids so humbly. My Cousin Anne that was the Queen----'

She came stiffly and heavily forward from the bed with her hands out to
discoif her lady; but the Queen turned her head, caught at her fat hand,
put it against her cheek and fondled it.

'I would have your Highness feared by all,' the old lady said.

'I would have myself by all beloved,' Katharine answered. 'What, am I to
play the Queen and Highness to such serving-maids as I was once the
fellow and companion to?'

'Your Highness should not have sent the wench away,' the old woman said.

'Well, you have taken on a very sour voice,' the Queen said. 'I will
study to pleasure you more. Get you now back and rest you, for I know
you stand uneasily, and you shall not uncoif me.'

She began to unpin her coif, laying the golden pins in the silver
candle-dishes. When her hair was thus set free of a covering, though it
was smoothly braided and parted over her forehead, yet it was lightly
rebellious, so that little mists of it caught the light, golden and
rejoiceful. Her face was serious, her nose a little peaked, her lips
rested lightly together, and her blue eyes steadily challenged their
counterparts in the mirror with an assured and gentle glance.

'Why,' she said, 'I believe you have the right of it--but for a queen I
must be the same make of queen that I am as a woman. A queen gracious
rather than a queen regnant; a queen to grant petitions rather than one
to brush aside the petitioners.'

She stopped and mused.

'Yet,' she said, 'you will do me the justice to say that in the open and
in the light of day, when men are by or the King's presence demands it,
I do ape as well as I may the painted queens of galleries and the
stately ladies that are to be seen in pictured books.'

'I would not have had you send away the maid,' the old Lady Rochfor