t I was hideously
afraid. At bottom every woman is a coward."

"You were afraid to do it," said the Marquess, "but you were going to
do it, because there was no one else to do it! Ho, madame! had I an
army of such cowards I would drive the Scot not past the Border but
beyond the Orkneys."

The Queen then said, "But you are unarmed."

"Highness," he replied, "it is surely apparent that I, who have played
the traitor to two monarchs within the same day, cannot with either
decency or comfort survive that day." He turned upon the lords and
bishops twittering about his horse's tail. "You merchandise, get back
to your stations, and if there was ever an honest woman in any of your
families, the which I doubt, contrive to get yourselves killed this
day, as I mean to do, in the cause of the honestest and bravest woman
our time has known." Immediately the English forces marched toward
Merrington.

Philippa returned to her pavilion and inquired for John Copeland. She
was informed that he had ridden off, armed, in company with five of
her immediate retainers. She considered this strange, but made no
comment.

You picture her, perhaps, as spending the morning in prayer, in
beatings upon her breast, and in lamentations. Philippa did nothing of
the sort. She considered her cause to be so clamantly just that to
expatiate to the Holy Father upon its merits would be an impertinence;
it was not conceivable that He would fail her; and in any event, she
had in hand a deal of sewing which required immediate attention.
Accordingly she settled down to her needlework, while the Regent of
England leaned his head against her knee, and his mother told him that
ageless tale of Lord Huon, who in a wood near Babylon encountered the
King of Faery, and subsequently bereaved an atrocious Emir of his
beard and daughter. All this the industrious woman narrated in a low
and pleasant voice, while the wide-eyed Regent attended and at the
proper intervals gulped his cough-mixture.

You must know that about noon Master John Copeland came into the tent.
"We have conquered," he said. "Now, by the Face!"--thus, scoffingly,
he used her husband's favorite oath,--"now, by the Face! there was
never a victory more complete! The Scottish army is fled, it is as
utterly dispersed from man's seeing as are the sands which dried the
letters King Ahasuerus gave the admirable Esther!"

"I rejoice," the Queen said, looking up from her sewing, "that we have
conquered,