al perfumes.'

She was unwilling to bid the gentleman rise and go, because this was the
Lady Mary's room.

'Where your Grace is, there the spring abideth,' Mary said sardonically.
'_Ecce miraculum sicut erat, Joshua rege._'

The little Prince came timidly down to beg a flower from the Queen and
they all had their backs upon the spy. He ran his hands down his beard
and considered the Queen's words. Then swiftly he was on his feet and
through the door. He was more ready to brave the Lady Mary's after-wrath
than let the Queen see him upon his knees. For actually it was a treason
to kneel to the Lady Mary. It had been proclaimed so in the old days
when the King's daughter was always subject to new debasements. And who
knew whether now the penalty of treason might not still be enacted? It
was certain that the Queen had no liking for the Archbishop. Then, what
use might she not make of the fact that the Archbishop's man knelt,
seeming to curry favour, though in these days all men knelt to her, even
when the King was by? He cursed himself as he hastened away.

The Queen looked over her shoulder and caught the glint of his red heel
as it went past the doorpost.

'In our north parts,' she said, and she was glad that Lascelles had
fled, 'the seasons come ever tardily.'

'Well, your Grace has not delayed to blossom,' Mary said.

It was part of her humour when she was in a taunting mood to call the
Queen always 'your Grace' or 'your Majesty' at every turn of the phrase.

Katharine looked at the pink intently. Her face had no expression, she
was determined at once to have a cheerful patience and not to show it in
her face.

The little Prince stole his hand into hers.

'Wherefore did my father--_rex pater meus_--pummel the man in the long
cloak?' he asked.

'You knew it then?' Katharine asked of her stepdaughter.

'I knew it not,' the Lady Mary answered.

'I saw it from this window, but my sister would not look,' the Prince
said.

The Queen was going to shut, with her own hand, the door, the little boy
trotting behind her, but, purple-clothed and huge, the King was there.

'Well, I will not be shut out in mine own castle,' he said pleasantly.

In those, the quiet days of his realm when most things were going well,
his face beneath his beard had taken a rounder and a smoother outline.
He moved with motions less hasty than those he had had two years before,
and when he had cast a task off it was done with and went ou