Tudor--in token that we
have passed this way and sojourned in this Castle of Pontefract.'

He was dallying with time as if it were a luxury to dally: he looked
curiously round the room.

'Why, they have not housed you very well,' he said, and, as the
Archbishop shivered suddenly, he added, 'there should be glass in the
windows. This is a foul old kennel.'

'I have made a complaint to the Earl Marshal,' Cranmer said dismally,
'but 'a said there was overmuch room needed above ground.'

This room was indeed below ground and very old, strong, and damp. The
Archbishop's own hangings covered the walls, but the windows shot
upwards through the stones to the light; there was upon the ground of
stone not a carpet but only rushes; being early in the year, no
provision was made for firing, and the soot of the chimney back was
damp, and sparkled with the track of a snail that had lived there
undisturbed for many years, and neither increasing, because it had no
mate, nor dying, because it was well fed by the ferns that, behind the
present hangings, grew in the joints of the stones. In that low-ceiled
and dark place the Archbishop was aware that above his head were fair
and sunlit rooms, newly painted and hung, with the bosses on the
ceilings fresh silvered or gilt, all these fair places having been given
over to kinsmen of the yellow Earl Marshal from the Norfolk Queen
downwards. And the temporal and material neglect angered him and filled
him with a querulous bitterness that gnawed up even through his dread of
a future--still shadowy--fall and ruin.

The King looked sardonically at the line of the ceiling. He had known
that Norfolk, who was the Earl Marshal, had the mean mind to make him
set these indignities upon the Archbishop, and loftily he considered
this result as if the Archbishop were a cat mauled by his own dog whose
nature it was to maul cats.

The Archbishop had been standing with one hand on the arm of his heavy
chair, about to haul it back from the table to sit himself down. He had
been standing thus when the King had entered with the brusque words--

'Make you ready to write a letter to Rome.'

And he still stood there, the cold feet among the damp rushes, the cold
hand still upon the arm of the chair, the cap pulled forward over his
eyes, the long black gown hanging motionless to the boot tops that were
furred around the ankles.

'I have made a plaint to the Earl Marshal,' he said; 'it is not fitting
that