e God,' he said, 'before high and omnipotent Jove, I swear that
when I made this marriage I thought it was no marriage!' He reflected
for a breath and added, at the recollection of the cook's spits that had
been turned against him when he had by woman's guile been forced into
marriage with the widow in Paris, 'I was driven into it by force, with
sharp points at my throat. Is that not enow to void a marriage? Is that
not enow? Is that not enow?'

Katharine looked out over the great levels of the view. Her face was
rigid, and she swallowed in her throat, her eye being glazed and hard.
The King took his cue from a glance at her face.

'Get you gone, Goodman Rogue Magister,' he said, and he adopted a
canonical tone that went heavily with his rustic pose. 'A marriage made
and consummated and properly blessed by holy friar there is no undoing.
You are learned enough to know that. Rogue that you be, I am very glad
that you are trapped by this marriage. Well I know that you have dangled
too much with petticoats, to the great scandal of this my Court. Now you
have lost your preferment, and I am glad of it. Another and a better
than thou shall be the Queen's Chancellor, for another and a better than
thou shall wed this wench. We will get her such a goodly husband----'

A low, melancholy wail from Margot Poins' agonised face--a sound such as
might have been made by an ox in pain--brought him to a stop. It wrung
the Magister, who could not bear to see a woman pained, up to a pitch of
ecstatic courage.

'_Quid fecit Caesar_,' he stuttered; 'what Caesar hath done, Caesar can do
again. It was not till very lately since this canon of wedding and
consummating and blessing by a holy friar hath been derided and
contemned in this realm. And so it might be again----'

Katharine Howard cried out, 'Ah!' Her features grew rigid and as ashen
as cold steel. And, at her cry, the King--who could less bear than Udal
to hear a woman in pain--the King sprang up from his chair. It was as
amazing to all them as to hunters it is to see a great wild bull charge
with a monstrous velocity. Udal was rigid with fear, and the King had
him by the throat. He shook him backwards and forwards so that his book
fell upon the Queen's feet, bursting out of his ragged gown, and his
cap, flying from his opened hand, fell down over the battlement into an
elm top. The King guttered out unintelligible sounds of fury from his
vast chest and, planted on his huge feet, h