the printer
said. 'I will bring them here into this room before ye.' He turned upon
the stranger. 'Master,' he said, 'if ye know not of this, you are the
only man in England that is ignorant!'

The stranger said with a bitter despair--

'Well, I am come to hear what ye do say!'

So he heard tales from all the sewers of London, and it was plain to him
that all the commonalty cried shame upon their King. He screamed and
twisted there in his chair at the last, and when he was come out into
the darkness he fell upon his companion, and beat him so that he
screamed out.

He might have died--for, though the King's guard with their torches and
halberds were within a bowshot of them, they stirred no limb. And it was
a party of fellows bat-fowling along the hedges of that field that came
through the dark, attracted by the glare of the torches, the blaze of
the scarlet clothes, and the outcry.

And when they came, asking why that great man belaboured this thin and
fragile one, black shadows both against the light, the big man answered,
howling--

'This man hath made me bounden to slay my wife.'

They said that that was a thing some of them would have been glad of.

But the great figure cast itself on the ground at the foot of a tree
that stretched up like nerves and tentacles into the black sky. He tore
the wet earth with his fingers, and the men stood round him till the
Duke of Norfolk, coming with his sword drawn, hunted them afar off, and
they fell again to beating the hedges to drive small birds into their
nets.

For, they said, these were evidently of the quality whose griefs were
none of theirs.

IV

The Queen was walking in the long gallery of Hampton Court. The
afternoon was still new, but rain was falling very fast, so that through
the windows all trees were blurred with mist, and all alleys ran with
water, and it was very grey in the gallery. The Lady Mary was with her,
and sat in a window-seat reading in a book. The Queen, as she walked,
was netting a silken purse of a purple colour; her gown was very richly
embroidered of gold thread worked into black velvet, and the heavy day
pressed heavily on her senses, so that she sought that silence more
willingly. For three days she had had no news of her lord, but that
morning he was come back to Hampton, though she had not yet seen him,
for it was ever his custom to put off all work of the day before he came
to the Queen. Thus, if she were sad, she was tranqu