eing you and for grief at your harsh words,' he
answered.

She stood waiting with a sort of haughty submissiveness.

'I would you would delay your wooing. I have been on the road since
dawn with neither bit nor sup.'

He protested that he had starved more hideously than Tantalus since he
had seen her last.

She gave him indifferently her cheek to kiss.

'For pity's sake take me where I may rest,' she said, 'I have a maimed
arm.'

* * * * *

He uttered her panegyric, after a model of Tibullus, to the Lady
Rochford and the seven maids of honour under that lady's charge. He
was set upon Katharine's enjoyment, and he invented a lie that the
King had commanded a dress to be found for her to attend at the revels
that night. The maids were already dressing themselves. Two of them
were fairheaded, and four neither fair nor dark; but one was dark as
night, and dressed all in black with a white coif, so that she
resembled a magpie. Some were curling each other's hair and others
tightening stay-laces with little wheels set in their companions'
backs. Their bare shoulders were blue with the cold of the great
room, and their dresses lay in heaps upon sheets that were spread
about the clean floor--brocades sewn with pearls, velvets that were
inlaid with filagree work, indoor furs and coifs of fine lawn that
were delicately edged with black thread.

The high sounds of their laughter had reached through the door, but a
dead silence fell. The dark girl with a very long bust that raked back
like a pigeon's, and with dark and sparkling eyes, tittered derisively
at the magister and went on slowly rubbing a perfumed ointment into
the skin of her throat and shoulders.

'Shall he bring his ragged doxies here too?' she laughed. 'What a
taradiddle is this of Cophetua and a beggar wench.' The other maids
all tittered derisively at Udal.

The Lady Rochford, warming her back close before the fire, said
helplessly, 'I have no dresses beyond what you see.' She was already
attired in a bountiful wine-coloured velvet that was embroidered with
silver wire into entwined monograms of the initials of her name. Her
hood of purple made, above her ample brows, a castellated pattern
resembling the gate of a drawbridge. She, being the mistress of that
household, and compassionately loved by the ladies because she was so
helpless, timorous, and unable to control them, they had combined to
comb and perfume her and to