er attentively.

She had a supple, long body, a fair-tinted face, fair and reddish
hair, and eyes that had a glint of almond green--but her cheeks were
flushed and her eyes sparkled. She was so intent upon speaking her
mind that she had forgotten the pain of her arm. She thought that she
must have said enough to anger this brewer's son. But he answered
only:

'I think you have never been in the King's court'--and, from his
tranquil manner, she realised very suddenly that this man was not the
dirt beneath her feet.

She had never been in the King's court; she had never, indeed, been
out of the North parts. Her father had always been a very poor man,
with an ancient castle and a small estate that he had nearly always
neglected because it had not paid for the farming. Living men she had
never respected--for they seemed to her like wild beasts when she
compared them with such of the ancients as Brutus or as Seneca. She
had been made love to and threatened by such men as her cousin; she
had been made love to and taught Latin by her pedagogues. She was more
learned than any man she had ever met--and, thinking upon the heroes
of Plutarch, she found the present times despicable. She hardly owed
allegiance to the King. Now she had seen him and felt his
consciousness of his own power, she was less certain. But the King's
writs had hardly run in the Northern parts. Her men-folk and her
mother's people had hanged their own peasants when they thought fit.
She had seen bodies swinging from tree-tops when she rode hawking. All
that she had ever known of the King's power was when the convent by
their castle gates had been thrown out of doors, and then her
men-folk, cursing and raging, had sworn that it was the work of
Crummock. 'Knaves ruled about the King.'

If knaves ruled about him, the King was not a man that one need
trouble much over. Her own men-folk, she knew, had made and unmade
Kings. So that, when she thought of the hosts of saints and of the
blessed angels that hovered, wringing their hands and weeping above
England, she had wondered a little at times why they had never unmade
this King.

But to her all these things had seemed very far away. She had nothing
to do but to read books in the learned tongues, to imagine herself
holding disquisitions upon the spiritual republic of Plato, to ride,
to shoot with the bow, to do needlework, or to chide the maids. Her
cousin had loved her passionately; it was true that once, wh