once more at Katharine.

'I would I had had such manners as a stripling,' he uttered in a round
and friendly voice. 'I might have prospered better in love.' Going
sturdily along the corridor he picked up Culpepper's sword and set it
against the wall.

Culpepper, leaning against the doorpost, was gazing with ferocious
solemnity at the open clothes-press in which some hanging dresses
appeared like women standing. He smoothed his red beard and thrust
his cap far back on his thatch of yellow hair.

'Mark you,' he addressed the clothes-press harshly, 'that is Rochford
of Bosworth Hedge. At the end of that day they found him with
seventeen body wounds and the corpses of seventeen Scotsmen round him.
He is famous throughout Christendom. Yet in me you see a greater than
he. I am sent to cut such a throat. But that's a secret. Only I am a
made man.'

Katharine had closed her door. She knew it would take her twenty
minutes to get him into the frame of mind that he would go peaceably
away.

'Thou art very pleasant to-night,' she said. 'I have seldom seen thee
so pleasant.'

'For joy of seeing thee, Kat. I have not seen thee this six days.' He
made a hideous grinding sound with his teeth. 'But I have broken some
heads that kept me from thee.'

'Be calm,' Katharine answered; 'thou seest me now.'

He passed his hand over his eyes.

'I'll be calm to pleasure thee,' he muttered apologetically. 'You said
I was very pleasant, Kat.' He puffed out his chest and strutted to the
middle of the room. 'Behold a made man. I could tell you such secrets.
I am sent to slay a traitor at Rome, at Ravenna, at Ratisbon--wherever
I find him. But he's in Paris, I'll tell thee that.'

Katharine's knees trembled; she sank down into her tall chair.

'Whom shalt thou slay?'

'Aye, and that's a secret. It's all secrets. I have sworn upon the
hilt of my knife. But I am bidden to go by an old-young man, a make of
no man at all, with lips that minced and mowed. It was he bade the
guards pass me to thee this night.'

'I would know whom thou shalt slay,' she asked harshly.

'Nay, I tell no secrets. My soul would burn. But I am sent to slay
this traitor--a great enemy to the King's Highness, from the Bishop
of Rome. Thus I shall slay him as he comes from a Mass.'

He squatted about the room, stabbing at shadows.

'It is a man with a red hat,' he grunted. 'Filthy for an Englishman to
wear a red hat these days!'

'Put up your knife,' Katharine