liation. They were more successful from a comical point
of view. So Henry was really glad for something that would loosen the
tongue usually so lively, and for an opportunity to gratify his sister
from whom he was demanding such a sacrifice, and for whom he expected
to receive no less a price than the help of Louis of France, the most
powerful king of Europe, to the imperial crown.

Thus our meetings were broken up, and Brandon knew his dream was over,
and that any effort to see the princess would probably result in
disaster for them both; for him certainly.

The king upon that same day told Mary of the intercepted letter sent
by her to Brandon at Newgate, and accused her of what he was pleased
to term an improper feeling for a low-born fellow.

Mary at once sent a full account of the communication in a letter to
Brandon, who read it with no small degree of ill comfort as the
harbinger of trouble.

"I had better leave here soon, or I may go without my head," he
remarked. "When that thought gets to working in the king's brain, he
will strike, and I--shall fall."

Letters began to come to our rooms from Mary, at first begging Brandon
to come to her, and then upbraiding him because of his coldness and
cowardice, and telling him that if he cared for her as she did for
him, he would see her, though he had to wade through fire and blood.
That was exactly where the trouble lay; it was not fire and blood
through which he would have to pass; they were small matters, mere
nothings that would really have added zest and interest to the
achievement. But the frowning laugh of the tyrant, who could bind him
hand and foot, and a vivid remembrance of the Newgate dungeon, with a
dangling noose or a hollowed-out block in the near background, were
matters that would have taken the adventurous tendency out of even the
cracked brain of chivalry itself. Brandon cared only to fight where
there was a possible victory or ransom, or a prospect of some sort, at
least, of achieving success. Bayard preferred a stone wall, and
thought to show his brains by beating them out against it, and in a
sense he could do it. * * * What a pity this senseless, stiff-kneed,
light-headed chivalry did not beat its brains out several centuries
before Bayard put such an absurd price upon himself.

So every phase of the question which his good sense presented told
Brandon, whose passion was as ardent though not so impatient as
Mary's, that it would be worse tha