h under the
tower. In walking, they had come near him, and while they waited he
stood for a minute, gazing back down the path with boding and pathetic
eyes; then he disappeared.

She looked at Cromwell and thanked him for the warning, '_quia spicula
praevisa minus laedunt_.'

'I would have you read it: _gaudia plus laetificant_,' he answered
gravely.

A man with a conch-shaped horn upturned was suddenly blowing beneath
the archway seven hollow and reverberating grunts of sound that
drowned his voice. A clear answering whistle came from the water-gate.
Cromwell stayed, listening attentively; another stood forward to blow
four blasts, another six, another three. Each time the whistle
answered. They were the great officers' signals for their barges that
the men blew, and the whistle signified that these lay at readiness in
the tideway. A bustle of men running, calling, and making pennons
ready, began beyond the archway in the quadrangle.

Cromwell's face grew calm and contented; the King was sending to meet
Anne of Cleves.

'Y' are well read?' he asked her slowly.

'I was brought up in the Latin tongue or ever I had the English,' she
answered. 'I had a good master, one that spoke the learned language
always.'

'Aye, Nicholas Udal,' Cromwell said.

'You know all men in the land,' she said, with fear and surprise.

'I had him to master for the Lady Mary, since he is well disposed.'

''Tis an arrant knave tho' the best of pedagogues,' she answered. 'He
was cast out of his mastership at Eton for being a rogue.'

'For that, the worshipful your father had him to master,' he said
ironically.

'No, for that he was a ruined man, and taught for his victuals. We
welly starved at home, my sisters and I.'

He said slowly:

'The better need that you should grow beloved here.'

Standing there, before the bushes where no ears could overhear, he put
to her more questions. She had some Greek, more than a little French,
she could judge a good song, she could turn a verse in Latin or the
vulgar tongue. She professed to be able to ride well, to be conversant
with the terms of venery, to shoot with the bow, and to have studied
the Fathers of the Church.

'These things are well liked in high places,' he said. 'His Highness'
self speaks five tongues, loveth a nimble answer, and is a noble
huntsman.' He surveyed her as if she were a horse he were pricing.
'But I doubt not you have appraised yourself passing well,' he
uttered