utwitted one poor heart-broken
girl? But beware, sir; I tell you now I will be quits with you yet, or
my name is not Mary."

There is a limit to the best of feminine nerve, and at that limit
should always be found a flood of healthful tears. Mary had reached it
when she threw the necklace and shot her bolt at Wolsey, so she broke
down and hastily left the room.

The king, of course, was beside himself with rage.

"By God's soul," he swore, "she shall marry Louis of France, or I will
have her whipped to death on the Smithfield pillory." And in his
wicked heart--so impervious to a single lasting good impulse--he
really meant it.

Immediately after this, the king, de Longueville and Wolsey set out
for London.

I remained behind hoping to see the girls, and after a short time a
page plucked me by the sleeve, saying the princess wished to see me.

The page conducted me to the same room in which had been fought the
battle with Mary in bed. The door had been placed on its hinges again,
but the bed was tumbled as Mary had left it, and the room was in great
disorder.

"Oh, Sir Edwin," began Mary, who was weeping, "was ever woman in such
frightful trouble? My brother is killing me. Can he not see that I
could not live through a week of this marriage? And I have been
deserted by all my friends, too, excepting Jane. She, poor thing,
cannot leave."

"You know I would not go," said Jane, parenthetically. Mary continued:
"You, too, have been home an entire week and have not been near me."

I began to soften at the sight of her grief, and concluded, with
Brandon, that, after all, her beauty could well cover a multitude of
sins; perhaps even this, her great transgression against him.

The princess was trying to check her weeping, and in a moment took up
the thread of her unfinished sentence: "And Master Brandon, too, left
without so much as sending me one little word--not a line nor a
syllable. He did not come near me, but went off as if I did not
care--or he did not. Of course _he_ did not care, or he would not have
behaved so, knowing I was in so much trouble. I did not see him at all
after--one afternoon in the king's--about a week before that awful
night in London, except that night, when I was so frightened I could
not speak one word of all the things I wished to say."

This sounded strange enough, and I began more than ever to suspect
something wrong. I, however, kept as firm a grasp as possible upon the
stock of in