as Carter, that should carry it to Rome.

The Queen said: 'Praise God!'

For though she was not set to believe that next day that letter would be
sent, or for many days more, yet it seemed to her that by little and
little she was winning him to her will.

II

Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had builded him a new tennis court in
where his stables had been before poverty had caused him to sell the
major part of his horseflesh. He called to him the Duke of Norfolk, who
was of the Papist cause, and Sir Henry Wriothesley who was always
betwixt and between, according as the cat jumped, to see this new
building of his that was made of a roofed-in quadrangle where the stable
doors were bricked up or barred to make the grille.

But though Norfolk and Wriothesley came very early in the afternoon,
while it was yet light, to his house, they wasted most of the daylight
hours in talking of things indifferent before they went to their
inspection of this court. They stood talking in a long gallery beneath
very high windows, and there were several chaplains and young priests
and young gentlemen with them, and most of the talk was of a
bear-baiting that there should be in Smithfield come Saturday. Sir Henry
Wriothesley matched seven of his dogs against the seven best of the
Duke's, that they should the longer hold to the bear once they were on
him, and most of the young gentlemen wagered for Sir Henry's dogs that
he had bred from a mastiff out of Portugal.

But when this talk had mostly died down, and when already twilight had
long fallen, the Bishop said--

'Come, let us visit this new tennis place of mine. I think I shall show
you somewhat that you have not before seen.'

He bade, however, his gentlemen and priests to stay where they were,
for they had all many times seen the court or building. When he led the
way, prelatical and black, for the Duke and Wriothesley, into the lower
corridors of his house, the priests and young gentlemen bowed behind his
back, one at the other.

In the courtyard there were four hounds of a heavy and stocky breed that
came bounding and baying all round them, so that it was only by
vigilance that Gardiner could save Wriothesley's shins, for he was a man
that all dogs and children hated.

'Sirs,' the Bishop said, 'these dogs that ye see and hear will let no
man but me--not even my grooms or stablemen--pass this yard. I have bred
them to that so I may be secret when I will.'

He set the key i