towards them calling, 'Hal Poins.' He had black down upon
his chin and a roving eye. He wore a purple coat like a tabard, and a
cap with his master's arms upon a jewelled brooch.

'They say there's a Howard wench come to Court,' he cried from a
distance, 'and thy sister in her service.'

'We talk of her,' Poins answered. 'Here is my sister.'

The young Pewtress kissed the girl upon the cheek.

'Pray, you, sweetheart, unfold,' he said. 'You are a pretty piece, and
have a good brother that's my friend.'

He asked all of a breath whether this lady had yet had the small-pox?
whether her hair were her own? how tall she stood without high heels
to her shoon? whether her breath were sweet or her language unpleasing
in the Lincolnshire jargon? whether the King had sent her many
presents?

Margaret Poins was a very large, fair, and credulous creature, rising
twenty. Florid and slow-speaking, she had impulses of daring that
covered her broad face with immense blushes. She was dressed in grey
linsey-woolsey, and wore a black hood after the manner of the stricter
Protestants, but she had round her neck a gilt medallion on a gold
chain that Katharine Howard had given her already. She was, it was
true, the daughter of a gentleman courtier, but he had been knocked on
the head by rebels near Exeter just before her birth, and her mother
had died soon after. She had been treated with gloomy austerity by her
uncle and with sinister kindness by her grandfather, whom she dreaded.
So that, coming from her Bedfordshire aunt, who had a hard cane, to
this palace, where she had seen fine dresses and had already been
kissed by two lords in the corridors, she was ready to aver that the
Lady Katharine had a breath as sweet as the kine, a white skin which
the small-pox had left unscarred, hair that reached to her ankles, and
a learning and a wit unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she
believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn
it, and, living in an age of marvels--dragons, portents from the
heavens, and the romances of knight errantry--she was ready to believe
it. It was true that the lady's room had proved a cell more bare and
darker than her own at home, but Katharine's bright and careless
laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and
pleasant words, made the girl say with hot loyalty:

'She is more fair than any in the land, and, indeed, she is the apple
of the King's eye.' Her voice was gr