'These dark passages are frightening to maids. Up now, pretty. I was thinking of thee.
'Who the devil shall harm thee?' he muttered again. 'This is mine own house. Come, pray with me. Prayer is a very soothing thing. I was bound to pray. I pray ever at nightfall. Up now. Come--pray, pray, pray!'
His heavy benevolence for a moment shed a calmness upon the place. She rose, and pressing back the hair from her forehead, saw the long, still corridor, the guard beneath the torch, the doors of the chapel.
She said to herself pitifully: 'What comes next?' She was too wearied to move again.
'Child, you did well to come to me, when you came in the stables.'
She leaned against the tapestry upon the wall to listen to him.
'It is true,' he admitted, 'that you have men that hate you and your house. The Bishop of Winchester did show me a letter you wrote. I do pardon it in you. It was well written.'
'Ah,' she uttered wearily, 'so you say now. But you shall change your mind ere morning.'
'Body of God, no,' he answered. 'My mind is made up concerning you. Let us call a truce to these things. It is my hour for prayer. Let us go to pray.'
Knowing how this King's mind would change from hour to hour, she had little hope in his words. Nevertheless slowly it came into her mind that if she were ever to act, now that he was in the mood was the very hour. But she knew nothing of the coil in which she now was. Yet without the King she could do nothing; she was in the hands of other men: of Throckmorton, of Privy Seal, of God knew whom.
'Sir,' she said, 'at the end of this passage stood a man.'
'He stands there still,' he said. 'He is tying his arm with a kerchief. He looks like one Throckmorton.'
'Then, if he have not run,' she said. 'Call him here. He has had my knife in his arm. He holds a letter of mine.'
'You have been writing amorous epistles?' he muttered.
'God knows there was naught of love,' she answered. 'Do you bid him unpouch it.' She closed her eyes; she was done with this matter.
'Ho, you, approach!' and as through the shadows Throckmorton's shoes clattered on the boards he held out a thickly gloved hand. Throckmorton made no motion to put anything into it, and the King needs must speak.
'You are all of a make,' the King said gloomily. 'Can no woman write a letter but what you will be of it?'