mer Ferne?... Is
he ill? Is he wounded?"

Cecily wrung her hands. "Now I must tell thee.... It is his honor that
doth suffer. There is a thing that he did.--He hath confessed, or surely
there were no believing ... Damans, they call him traitor.... Ah!"

"Ay, and I'll strike thee again an thou say that again!" cried Damaris.

The younger woman shrank before the angry eyes, the disdain of the
smiling lips. Abruptly Damaris moved from the frightened girl. Upon the
wall, above a dressing-table, hung a Venetian mirror. The maid of honor
looked at her image in the glass, then with flying fingers undid and
laid aside her ruff, substituting for it a structure of cobweb lace,
between whose filmy walls were displayed her white throat and bosom.
Around her throat she clasped three rows of pearls, and also wound with
pearls her dark-brown hair. Her eyes were very bright, but there was no
color in her face. Delicately, skilfully, she remedied this, until with
shining eyes and that false bloom upon her oval cheeks one would have
sworn she was as joyous as she was fair.

[Illustration: "'DAMARIS, THEY CALL HIM TRAITOR'"]

Cecily, watching her with a beating heart, at last broke silence:
"Oh, Damaris, whither are you going?"

Damaris looked over her shoulder. "After a while I will be sorry that I
struck thee, Cis.... I am going to talk with men." She clasped a gold
chain about her slender waist, dashed scented water upon her hands,
glanced at her full and sweeping skirts of green silk shot with silver.
"I have broken my fan," she said; "wilt lend me thy great plumed one?"
Cecily brought the splendid toy. The maid of honor took it from her;
then, with a last glance at the mirror, swept towards the door, but on
the threshold turned and came back for one moment to her chamber-fellow.
"Forgive me, Cis," she said, and kissed the girl's wet cheek.

The great anteroom had its usual throng of courtiers, those of a day and
those whose ghosts might come to haunt the floors that their mortal feet
so oft had trodden. Men of note and worth were there, and men of no
other significance than that wrought by rich apparel. Here men brought
their dearest hopes and fears, and here they came to flaunt a feather or
to tell a traveller's tale. It was the place of deferred hopes and the
place of poisoned tongues, and the place in which to suck the last
sweet drop in an enemy's cup of trembling. It was the haunt of laughter
and of fevered wit and of riv