l jump out in just a moment."

A little scream from Jane startled everybody, and she quickly ran up
to the king, saying: "I beg your majesty to go. She will do as she
says so sure as you remain; you don't know her; she is very angry.
Please go; I will bring her down stairs somehow."

"Ah, indeed! Jane Bolingbroke," came from the bed. "I will receive my
guests myself when they are kind enough to come to my room." The
cover-lid began to move, and, whether or not she was really going to
carry out her threat, I cannot say, but Henry, knowing her too well to
risk it, hurried us all out of the room and marched down stairs at the
head of his defeated cohorts. He was swearing in a way to make a
priest's flesh creep, and protesting by everything holy that Mary
should be the wife of Louis or die. He went back to Mary's room at
intervals, but there was enough persistence in that one girl to stop
the wheels of time, if she but set herself to do it, and the king came
away from each visit the victim of another rout.

Finally his anger cooled and he became amused. From the last visit he
came down laughing:

[Illustration]

"I shall have to give up the fight or else put my armor on with visor
down," said he; "it is not safe to go near her without it; she is a
very vixen, and but now tried to scratch my eyes out."

Wolsey, who had a wonderful knack for finding the easiest means to a
difficult end, took Henry off to a window where they held a whispered
conversation.

It was pathetic to see a mighty king and his great minister of state
consulting and planning against one poor girl; and, as angry as I felt
toward Mary, I could not help pitying her, and admired, beyond the
power of pen to write, the valiant and so far impregnable defense she
had put up against an array of strength that would have made a king
tremble on his throne.

Presently Henry gave one of his loud laughs, and slapped his thigh as
if highly satisfied with some proposition of Wolsey's.

"Make ready at once," he said. "We will go back to London."

In a short time we were all at the main stairway ready to mount for
the return trip.

The Lady Mary's window was just above, and I saw Jane watching us as
we rode away.

After we were well out of Mary's sight the king called me to him, and
he, together with de Longueville, Wolsey and myself, turned our
horses' heads, rode rapidly by a circuitous path back to another door
of the castle and re-entered without the kn