George returned the look, struck to an expression of that amazement that she often aroused in him.

God's truth! but you are monstrous sure of being queen, little sister!"

"Why so I am," she declared, her eyes glowing with high confidence, her lips edged with laughter, “so I am, an I do not have the smallpox - or lose a front tooth!"

CHAPTER XIV

THE PESTILENCE

'HAT was in November and no result could be expected from Knight for two months or more. Those months seemed long to Henry's impatience and to Anne's, but after all when two people are in love even when one of them is only in love with love-the time is not tedious. And they had every resource of amusement.

Anne found her position tremendously exciting. She lived in that excitement, slept, ate, talked, danced in it. Henry was her shadow. There was no pretense now of concealment; everyone knew she expected to be made queen, and whether the courtiers believed in her success or not, they treated her with the deference due to one already crowned. She breathed an atmosphere of adulation. Even her confessor, when she owned to him that she felt her bearing over-proud, declared to her that he had never found the grace of humility so sweetly flourishing in any female character. For the confessor, too, had his ambitions. He wanted to be the confessor of a queen.

ance.

Everywhere Anne carried herself with blithe assurFrom her air with Henry she might have been the queen and he the consort. Her gowns and jewels were paid for out of the privy purse. She moved, a bright, spectacular figure, across each day's stage of petty drama, gay, alluring, audaciously confident. At the

Christmas revels she and Henry whispered together that before the next Yule-tide she would be his wife and

queen.

In January she suffered a sharp reversal of spirit. The documents which Knight had obtained from the pope, whom he had seen after his escape to Orvieto, were forwarded by special courier and were found not to have been worth the pain of writing, for by an ingeniously inserted word or two Clement had contrived to make the commission of no effect. Whatever the English court might decide, permission to appeal to the pope was still left, and the fact that Clement retained this right pointed that he intended to exercise it.

Balked and chagrined, Henry made life thoroughly unpleasant for those around him, and Anne wreaked part of her chagrin upon him by leaving court for Hever. It was a triumph for Wolsey, for it sustained his objections to Knight, and the cardinal made haste now to bestir himself in the royal cause, sending his own chief secretary, Dr. Stephen Gardiner, and Dr. Edward Foxe of the Royal Chapel, hurrying to the pope with twofold instructions. They were to urge him to give to Wolsey and to some other legate such authority as would enable them to pronounce a final judgment in the case, and they were to dispel any prejudices the pope might be entertaining against the lady whom the indiscreet Knight had allowed him to learn was Catherine's chosen successor.

Anne smiled when at Hever the two emissaries stopped there to display their instructions - she read in the cardinal's fine hand of her, "excellent virtuous qualities, the purity of her life, her soberness, chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, descent right noble and high through regal blood, and education in all good and laudable qualities and manners!" Truly, a great change

had come over the times since she had been cast aside as too trifling for the bride of an earl's son!

Great stress was laid, in Wolsey's appeal, upon the urgent need of England for a prince and heir. The need was great, for no woman had reigned upon its throne, and if the kingdom was left without a direct male heir it would be torn between rival claims. The Princess Mary's succession would be most certainly disputed by the Duke of Richmond, by James the Fifth of Scotland, son of Henry's eldest sister, Margaret, by the Greys, inheriting through his second sister, Mary, and by the Marquis of Exeter, grandson of Edward the Fourth; and there were others, too, who would press what claims they possessed if the chance offered. A formidable array of perils!

Anne, when she read this, was shrouded in far-reaching dreams. She felt the house of her hopes was built upon a rock for she had the strongest of political necessities to back her. It should be clear to the most blinded that it was better for an old woman to be displaced than for the kingdom to run red with the blood of another civil war.

The raw, wet February of 1528 kept England shivering a month long; a windy March swept over the land and it was April before word came from the two emissaries, and then a special messenger reported that after lengthy struggles with Clement they were obtaining all the king desired. Anne, in high feather, carried her head higher than ever and Henry's rollicking good humor made the court a carnival.

When Foxe himself arrived in May, bearing the commission from the pope which appointed the case to be tried in England before Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal

Campeggio, Henry and Anne kept him with them the day long, making merry over the news, and when he left them, late at night, he was ordered to go at once to Durham Place in the Strand, where Wolsey was, and show him the commission.

66

How now, Wolsey?" was Henry's cheery greeting, next morning. "Is it not well done?"

The cardinal hesitated and in that instant Henry's good-humored challenge changed to something of belligerency.

"Aye, your Grace, 'tis well-as far as it goes," the cardinal said slowly.

"As far as what flaws do you pick? Could a man better advised toward England be chosen than this Cardinal Campeggio? And he is ordered to hasten here next month. Marry, if the pope does not intend to decide in my favor why permits he to have the case opened at all?" "Perchance his Eminence hath found some reason for further delay," came from Anne Boleyn in dangerously silken tones.

Again there ran through the man before them that prickling current of dread. He felt how precarious, for all his care, was his footing among these pitfalls. How they turned on him at the first hint of denial! Was he to blame that Foxe had not brought a strong enough commission? True the permission to have the case tried by the legates in England was granted, but there was no definite, only an implicit, surrender of final authority to that court, and Wolsey's trained mind saw that, as in Knight's documents, though more subtly covered, the appeal to Rome was still open. But his caution, aroused by the revelation of their manner, closed his lips. He answered smoothly, "No more delay — nay. I am but

so zealous in the cause that I would not leave room for