welled belt.

'It is plain justice,' he muttered. 'The farm was ceded to my brother
after Hyde Monastery was torn down. It was to my brother, not to my
brother's wife, who is now your son's.'

Cromwell turned upon the Chancellor of the Augmentations who stood in
the shadow of the tall mantelpiece. He was twisting his fingers in his
thin grey beard that wagged tremulously when he spoke.

'Truly,' he bleated piteously, 'it stands in the register of the
Augmentations as the worshipful knight says.'

Cromwell cried out, in a studied rage: 'I made thee and I made thy
office: I will unmake the one and the other if it and thou know no
better law.'

'God help me,' the Chancellor gasped. He shrank again into the shadow
of the chimney, and his blinking eyes fell upon Cromwell's back with a
look of dread and the hatred of a beast that is threatened at the end
of its hole.

'Sir,' Cromwell frowned darkly upon Ughtred, 'the law stands thus if
the Augmentation people know it not. This farm and others were given
to your late brother upon his marriage, that the sister of the Queen
might have a proper state. The Statute of Uses hath here no say.
Understand me: It was the King's to give; it is the King's still.' He
opened his mouth so wide that he appeared to bellow. 'That farm
falleth to the survivor of those two, who is now my son's wife. What
judge shall gainsay that?' He swayed his body round on his motionless
and sturdily planted legs, veering upon the Chancellor and the knight
in turn, as if he challenged them to gainsay him who had been an
attorney for ten years after he had been a wool merchant.

Ughtred shrugged his shoulders heavily, and the Chancellor hastened to
bleat:

'No judge shall gainsay your lordship. Your lordship hath an excellent
knowledge of the law.'

'Why hast thou not as good a one?' Cromwell rated him. 'I made thee
since I thought thou hadst.' The Chancellor choked in his throat and
waved his hands.

'Thus the law is,' Cromwell said to Ughtred. 'And if it were not so
Parliament should pass an Act so to make it. For it is a scandal that
a Queen's sister, an aunt of the Prince that shall be King, should
lose her lands upon the death of her husband. It savours of treason
that you should ask it. I have known men go to the Tower upon less
occasion.'

'Well, I am a broken man,' Sir Leonard muttered.

'Why, God help you,' Cromwell said. 'Get you gone. The law takes no
account of whether a man be broke