and
forbidding tone to Culpepper:

'Take thou my niece to the water-gate. I shall send women to her.' He
hastened frostily up the path to be gone before Henry should return
again.

Culpepper resolved that he would take barge before ever the Duke
could send. But the mule slewed right across the terrace; his cousin
grasped the brute's neck and her loosened hood began to fall back from
her head.

The King, standing twenty yards away, with his hand shaking Cromwell's
shoulder, was saying:

'See you how grey I grow.'

The words came hot into a long harangue. He had been urging that he
must have more money for his works at Calais. He was agitated because
a French chalk pit outside the English lines had been closed to his
workmen. They must bring chalk from Dover at a heavy cost for barges
and balingers. This was what it was to quarrel with France.

Cromwell had his mind upon widening the breach with France. He said
that a poll tax might be levied on the subjects of Charles and Francis
then in London. There were goldsmiths, woolstaplers, horse merchants,
whore-masters, painters, musicians and vintners....

The King's eyes had wandered to the grey river, and then from a deep
and moody abstraction he had blurted out those words.

Henry was very grey, and his face, inanimate and depressed, made him
seem worn and old enough. Cromwell was not set to deny it. The King
had his glass....

He sighed a little and began:

'The heavy years take their toll.'

Henry caught him up suddenly:

'Why, no. It is the heavy days, the endless nights. You can sleep,
you.' But him, the King, incessant work was killing.

'You see, you see, how this world will never let me rest.' In the
long, black nights he started from dozing. When he took time to dandle
his little son a panic would come over him because he remembered that
he lived among traitors and had no God he could pray to. He had no
mind to work....

Cromwell said that there was no man in England could outwork his
King.

'There is no man in England can love him.' His distracted eyes fell
upon the woman on the mule. 'Happy he whom a King never saw and who
never saw King,' he muttered.

The beast, inspired with a blind hatred of Culpepper, was jibbing
across the terrace, close at hand. Henry became abstractedly
interested in the struggle. The woman swayed forward over her knees.

'Your lady faints,' he called to Culpepper.

In his muddled fury the man began once again tr