The Queen then remembered very well how she had been a little girl with
the Magister for tutor in her father's great and bare house. It was
after Udal had been turned out of his mastership at Eton. He had been in
vile humour in most of those days, and had beaten her very often and
fiercely with his bundle of twigs. It was only afterwards that he had
called her his best pupil.

Remembering these things, she dropped her voice and sat still, thinking.
Cicely Elliott, who could not keep still, blew a feather into the air
and caught it again and again. The old Lady Rochford, her joints swollen
with rheumatism, played with her beads in her lap. From time to time she
sighed heavily and, whilst the Magister wrote, he sighed after her.
Katharine would not send her ladies away, because she would not be alone
with him to have him plague her with entreaties. She would not go
herself, because it would have been to show him too much honour then,
though a few days before she would have gone willingly because his
vocation and his knowledge of the learned tongues made him a man that it
was right to respect.

But when she read what he had written for her, his lean, brown face
turning eagerly and with a ferreting motion from place to place on the
parchment, she was filled with pity and with admiration for the man's
talent. It was as if Seneca were writing to his master, or Pliny to the
Emperor Trajan. And, being a very tender woman at bottom--

'Magister,' she said, 'though you have wrought me the greatest grief I
think ye could, by so injuring one I like well, yet this is to me so
great a service that I will entreat the King to remit some of your
pains.'

He stumbled up from his stool and this time managed to kneel.

'Oh, Queen,' he said, '_Doctissima fuisti_; you were the best pupil that
ever I had----' She tried to silence him with a motion of her hand. But
he twined his lean hands together with the little chains hanging from
them. 'I call this to your pitiful mind,' he brought out, 'not because I
would have you grateful, but to make you mindful of what I suffer--_non
quia grata sed ut clemens sis_. For, for advancement I have no stomach,
since by advancing me you will advance my wife from Paris, and for
liberty I have no use since you may never make me free of her. Leave me
to rot in my cell, but, if it be but the tractate of Diodorus Siculus, a
very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint,
I starve, I