was smothered by girlish anticipation of the joys to come in England.

English joys, however, failed most dismally of materialization. She found herself an attendant on a queen who devoted her time to mass and embroidery and her money to priests and chapels, while the king was absorbed in a distant round of hunting, gambling, beefy banqueting, and noisy revelry. The girl looked in vain. for the tone, the verve, the intelligence of the French court and felt curiously alien in this damp, foggy, slowspoken England with its Spanish queen.

But the court had not been insensible to Anne's grace and wit, and as she grew older her charm shone as much as Catherine's dark chambers permitted. Her cousin, Thomas Wyatt, fell very desperately in love with her, and at the last Christmas jousts, where he won the championship, he had crowned her Queen of Love and Beauty. Other lovers began to gather about her, idle young court rufflers who all too frequently were leaving their neglected wives in the country while they themselves sought the favor of the king.

The girl was exposed to a degree of corruption and callously accepted vice that would have been the undoing of a spirit less fine. But Anne was too vigorous for such frailty. She knew very well the form she meant her fortune to take and in Percy she had found the realization of all her dreams. And now what was before her?

At four, the ladies in waiting, seven tables of them, supped together at mess and Anne went down to face the ordeal with the unflinching courage that companioned her proud temper. She bathed her poor flushed face, powdered her suspiciously purple nose, and trusted

hopefully to the concealment of the wealth of dark hair which she wore unconfined save for a single ribbon across the brow. That hair had been another cause of friction with the queen, for Catherine, whose scant locks were combed back over a small, hard roll to form a round coif about the face and were then capped by a seven pointed affair of black velvet, had denounced the girl's flowing curls as "French wiggery." It was a curious feminine satisfaction to Anne's spirit now to shake out her hair in defiance of the queen's established fashion; and the freedom of this style accorded well with her slight, springing type and framed to striking advantage her gypsy-like face, with its sparkling eyes and drolly demure mouth.

It was a hard mouth to-night as she faced the throng, and sharp sayings slipped through it as her excitement gained from the innuendo and sly laughter about her. Behind the light sentences her tongue stung like a dagger, as Wyatt had observed, and there was often more will than wit in the retorts that came back at her from her unfriendly companions.

Of all the girls there was but one to whom Anne felt drawn and this one could scarcely be called a confidante. She was Helen Sackville, a tall, colorless girl, with a long nose and curious gray-green eyes under light lashes, a desperately un-handsome young woman, yet with a shrewd humor and a caustic wit that were meat and drink to Anne among the bland hypocrisies of the older ladies in waiting. To this girl Anne gravitated when the others were disposed about the queen's chambers for a game of écarté. Helen looked down at her with an air of quizzical amusement.

"So there is where you have been these fine moonlight nights, Mistress Anne- trysting with my Lord Percy?"

Anne nodded briefly, her nerves still tingling from an encounter with a Spanish woman who had condoled ironically with her loss of prospects. Her eyes were on the doors that were being continually opened to admit the visitors who came to pay their respects here or try a hand at the cards.

"H'm a pretty romance," Helen commented. "We had marked you together in company but never surmised how far you had progressed. . . . Methinks you were not over civil to our Gracious Majesty this afternoon?"

Anne's features quivered ever so slightly and her head went up an inch or so. "What happened when I left?” she demanded.

"Oh, the world wagged on the same. I embroidered a deer's head and horns as long as eternity. Donna Maria read a sage book aloud on the saving of soulsOh, it seems that the queen did make the scornful jest that you seemed in great anxiety for the wedding. The Spanish women enjoyed it."

The hot color deepened in Anne's face but she made no response. Slander was too current at court to be amazed at, but her anger registered one more incentive against the queen. The doors had opened again and on the heels of the entering courtiers came a little page in Cardinal Wolsey's scarlet livery, tricked out in gold thread and lace like a pretty popinjay. He made butterfly trips about the room, lingering now at this group, now at that, for a message or a jest, and at length he slipped over to the corner where Anne, whose eyes had never left him, stood waiting with Helen, in tense expectancy.

"What news?" she demanded in a quick whisper.

The little fellow shrugged and shook his head.

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None that is good. Never have I seen the cardinal

more incensed. My Lord Percy is in sore straits. There is no hope for thee, Mistress Anne." He flicked a grain of snuff off his ruffles with careful concern. Anne wanted none of the puppet's judgments; her desperate concern was with the facts.

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"Tell me what has chanced," she besought. What said the cardinal to him?"

6

"Much - and all to the same music. He was wroth that Percy, who was in his care, had neither acquainted the lord, his father, nor yet the king's Majesty with the matter but must go about the choosing of a wife with as much ease and indifference as if he were a peasant or a hall boy and not the heir to one of the noblest earldoms in the kingdom. Hadst thou submitted this matter unto his Highness,' quoth the cardinal, 'he would have advanced thee much more and mated thee according to thy degree and honor, and so by thy wise behavior thou might have grown into his grace and favor. But now - and his voice was terrible, mistress!-' see,' he said, 'what you have done through your willfulness. You have not only offended your father but also your loving sovereign lord and matched yourself with such a one as neither your king nor your father will consent to:— and hereof I put thee out of doubt that I will send for thy father, who, at the coming, shall either break this unadvised bargain or disinherit thee forever.' And he went on to say the king's Majesty would also complain of him, to the earl, because his Majesty had intended thee for another."

"But why," came hotly from Anne, “am I so scorned as a match for this high Percy? My mother was a Howard -"

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Aye, aye, so spake Percy to the cardinal. Poor. lad," said the little page patronizingly, "he was so shaken

and put about he was weeping like a nervous girl. We could hear his voice through all the courtyard."

Anne uttered an impatient little sound. "But what did he say?"

"Oh, that he had not known the king's pleasure and was sorry for it, that he had held himself of good years and able to provide a convenient wife as fancy should please. And he said that though you be but a simple maid and a knight to your father, you had descended of right noble parentage, for your mother is high of the Norfolk blood and your father descended of the Earl of Ormond - Oh, the Lord Percy spoke well for you, mistress, and begged the cardinal on his knees to intercede in his behalf, and with the king, for this matter that was so dear to him that he could not forsake."

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'Aye?" Anne's face was sparkling.

Why, at that the cardinal turned round to us," went on the page, all fire and gesture in the telling," and, ‘Lo, sirs,' he quoth, 'ye may see what wisdom is in that boy's willful head. I thought that when thou heardest the king's pleasure and intent thou wouldest have put thyself wholly to the king's will.' Oh, but his voice was a terrible thing, mistress, and his face held so great a rage that Lord Percy looked everywhere but there. So I would, sir,' he made answer stammeringly enough, but in this matter I have gone so far I know not how to discharge myself and my conscience.'"

"A pious cavalier!" came in low mockery from Helen.

"He said that?" cried Anne.

"His very words," the page affirmed, a little sulky at being snapped off in the thread of his dramatic recital. Ah, Percy was weakening, the girl divined. In his place she would never have weakened! That soft pli