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“If our father had not given you a Frenchwoman about you it would have been better for you and for us all,” tossed the young girl to the elder. “You are as arrant a coquette as walks on ten toes, and what you and she have been after at the French Court God knows! If she could further you in any devilry she would! Why, now you have come back packed with French airs and graces you cannot so much as pass a gardener lad without your eyes asking ‘What would you give to kiss me?’—And you mock at me?”

“Each to his own trade, sister, but for my part I don’t admire your motto ‘All for love and the world well lost.’ Maybe it’s safer to have a gardener lad casting sheep’s eyes than allow a king to make you a laughing-stock. Simonette has taught me better than that—all said and done! And I had a lesson or two at the French Court. After all, our father was Ambassador there and the Frenchmen thought me worth teaching.”

They sat on the mossy bole of a fallen elm in the great park at Hever Castle, and the ripe warmth of the late Kentish spring was abroad in the land, and above them feathered and waved the glorious elms and beeches glittering in May sunshine. But the sisters did not smile to it. You must feel them to be quick-eyed and tongued brunettes—their tempers flashing, but in Anne all was quickest, though she hid it when she pleased, as Mary could not. They had had constant angers since Anne came home a month ago from her maid-of-honourship at the French Court to find Mary at Hever sent down in disgrace from the English Court and the whole family in a perplexity of shame and anger over the girl. Certainly Anne was not one to hold her own tongue out of any foolish sympathy in such a case, and she had tongue-lashed Mary with adroit ironies and little sardonic laughters to which the other could never retort, try as she would.

Now Mary Boleyn sprang up and glared at her—she could be bold with a woman though even then only on the edge of a desperate sally of tears, and Anne, who knew her weakness to the bone, sat fanning her glowing cheeks languidly with a great horse-chestnut leaf and measuring the girl with a look of measureless contempt. Mary made a swift slant to strike her on the cheek but her heart failed her.

“No, insolent French monkey!” she cried, quivering. “You shall not lower me to that. If the King did make love to me I did not yield.—Reason good, I should have been starring it at Court and not shut up here, if I had, with a minx like you.”

Anne fanned on.

“You did not yield? Indeed? Then why did the poor good Queen send for you and tell you her mind about your behaviour with the King’s Grace? If——”

“She never did!” cried Mary Boleyn, scarlet as an autumn berry, and still the taunting green fan waved on.

“If she never did rumour is a liar and—why add lies to—— I won’t say what!”

Now she sprang to her feet and faced the cowering Mary. Words poured from her like the song from the thrush on the may-tree but not so kindly:

“The Queen sent for you and told you that you were shameless. She spoke of the day Lady Mountjoy her friend caught you with him in the garden-house at Greenwich, and she was as white and stern as the saints she worships from morning till night. And she said you were banished the Court and the King’s Grace did not wag a finger to save his lady-love. I declare I could forgive him that if he had chosen any but a green gosling like you! And then you must confess and be sorry, and here you sit at Hever twiddling your thumbs and simpering and crying over your lost virtue like a village girl after the fair. Didn’t men pester me in France—offer after offer!—and did I listen? I knew better. I say a girl that goes so far with a man—king or knave—and comes back with nothing to show for it is a simpleton and a disgrace and a fool!”

She plumped down on the tree again after her oration and tossed the leaf away as if she hated it. She looked as if for two pins she would have clawed Mary—Mary who was as pale now for fury as she had been red.

“And what should I have to show for it? Wages for my kisses—not I! That’s you! That’s Simonette! You that have come home from France with your mails [trunks] full of love-letters and verses and gifts from men. Wages? When I love a man I kiss him but I do not ask a coin for a kiss. And if Wyatt told you this I know who told him and will be even with her. The Queen would never tell! A good woman, poor soul, and I pitied her—I did! I care nothing for you, but I pitied her.”

“Wyatt!” Anne’s voice was scorn distilled. “Do I need to ask a man, when all the French Court was giggling at you—‘O, she had not the wit to ask so much as a new cloak from a royal lover! One must pity the lady’s people! Does such angelic folly run in the family?’ I can tell you it stung me. It made me urgent to run for home whether there was to be war between France and England or not. Why, I saw the King’s Grace when he met the French King at Calais—gold and jewels and place and power pouring through his hands like water. It was ask and have if you had not been a fool. The French ladies—Blessed Virgin! how they laughed!”

Mary gasped. Amazing world! They blamed her—they scorned her—they made life a burden even to her good-nature—not because the King had been her careless sweetheart for a few insane weeks, but because she faced them empty-handed. They really did not mince matters. Only her poor good stepmother Lady Boleyn had said lamentably:

“Girls should let married men be. It is against Church and State to poach in another woman’s preserve. But if you did it to please his Grace——” Words failed her.

They also failed Mary. She had spent some miserable weeks at Hever, and then Anne came hurrying back from France to rub salt and vinegar into her wounds. Anne, with the airs of a reigning beauty, as indeed she had every right. Anne, who had set the fashions at the French Court, who had sung like all the seraphs, to harp and lute (with the words a little changed from the praises of heaven)!—Anne, whose notice made man or woman the mode, to be numbered in whose group made a young woman a fit partner for princes. Anne, who danced like a wave of the sea, and was as cold and bright. Anne, whose heart would never betray her head!—it is not too much to say that Mary loathed this brilliant heartless success with its dancing searchlight on her own failure. Wildly she looked about her now for a shaft—and found it.

“Some might guess you came home because you failed to find a fine French husband who would take the risk of your coquetries. Some might say some man kissing you had seen that on your throat which you always hide, and told the rest. Some might say——”

She halted suddenly at the white fury which faced her. No word did Anne Boleyn utter, but suddenly and wildly Mary broke down in a thunderstorm of tears. A strange scene. Anne sat composedly eying her as if she had been a show found contemptible.—She did indeed find her absolutely impossible to understand except as a besotted fool.

Yet no one could deny Mary Boleyn prettiness pushed to an extreme;—even Anne never attempted that adventure;—dark brown hair, gold-burnished, long brown eyes heavily lashed above and below, a shy childish smile on lips like parted cherries, the smile that cannot repel kisses even if unwelcome. Her figure a shade over-ripe for her age, with velvet curves and flushes to match her soft dimpled hands and the dimples in her cheeks. But with all this she moved with little grace and no dignity. Men were her masters and her fate, and not a man living but would have staked his life on the truth of Anne’s taunts—granted always that the King had wooed the girl. If he had taken that trouble she had certainly yielded, for she could not do otherwise.

And as certainly she had wept with the Queen and felt herself a partner in her royal sorrows. A thornless woman-flower with no subtlety of charming. A daisy simple as milk and honey—balmy as the breath of kine at rest in lush meadows, sweet, but easy to forget, or to remember with a smile. Indeed Sir Thomas Boleyn had done ill to send that daughter to Court! The game was too fine for her—she would never win a round and would come back worse off than she went.

She had come back very much poorer. Queen Katharine, mother of one little-welcomed daughter and no son, was aging rapidly under her anxieties. Henry—the eighth of that name of English kings, golden-haired, florid, and amorous, had more than begun to feel the strain of his partial fidelity. The Queen knew it. Every woman at Court knew it whether personally concerned or otherwise. The men laughed discreetly and sympathetically in corners and—what more natural? they asked. The Queen had been a handsome young woman or Henry would never have married her, for all her birth and dowry. And he could easily have ridded himself of any obligation, since she had been his brother’s widow—though virgin—and was six years older than himself. But to his eighteen years a handsome young woman of four and twenty with delicious auburn hair that fell below her knees was tempting as a sunny peach upon a warm wall to a thirsty bee. Still, if that was natural it was also natural that when her young grace had stiffened into massive dignity and her light heart had grown heavy in sorrowing for the loss of baby sons who would have surrounded her with strength and safety the King should look for pleasure with gayer and younger women.

Mary Boleyn was not the first to feel the ray of royal interest, and when it turned her way its warmth overwhelmed her. But she had not the wit to profit by Simonette’s lessons or her chances, and here she was, her reputation cracked, not an extra coin in her purse and of land not so much as a sod to feed a lark. That was not the way with the King’s favourites in history and memory. But indeed Henry tired of her very quickly. His Katharine had been a good comrade, eager to please, drilled perforce in all the politics of Europe, more than half a saint, but yet kind and lenient and quick at the games and all the masques that pleased him. He knew her worth. And though it had been merry work to pluck the little cowslip and watch the dewy dawn of love in cloudless eyes, he tired very soon of that conquest and knew Mary Boleyn would no more make a tragedy of it than he an epic. He smiled quite contentedly on hearing she had been banished to the country. She had not the stock in trade to amuse him. But Anne’s contempt when she arrived from France and found her sister bewept, ashamed, and as sorry for the Queen as if she had really harmed her!—To have that chance and make nothing of it! Idiot!

She caught Thomas Wyatt when he came down from Court to rusticate with them as he had done since he and her handsome brother George were friends as boys and scribbled their verses together. He had always been in love with Anne more or less, and now it was more, and desperate. And from that unwilling victim she dissected out with delicate fingers the details of Mary’s amourette, swearing eternal secrecy and using the first chance and many after that to hurl it at her head. Unfortunate Mary!

She went off now, sobbing into her hands with rounded shoulders and bent head, Anne watching with speechless contempt. To cry over spilt milk? Futile and feminine to the last! And as she watched, her own brown eyes, so like Mary’s in form, so passionately different in expression, glittered like a falcon’s, and the strange yellow reflets which made their odd beauty showed under her lashes and danced like sunbeams in brown water. She was laughing—not so much at Mary as at the irony of human affairs. There was only one thing Mary had said which she would never forgive. One.

A little mirror covered in chased silver hung among a jingle of silver toys at her girdle. She slid the cover back and looked critically at the lovely brunette oval of her face, the disdainful exquisitely cut lips as apt to sneer as smile, the golden beauty of her skin with its damask glow acquired in country air and fed with country cream and eggs and bacon. She was the picture of health and young strength and activity, but with it all lissom as a willow and with the grace that makes every movement lovely. You may see it in the kitten when she crouches, eyes you with waving tail—springs, claws a mouse, pounces, and all so exquisitely that the whole is a poem in symbols and nothing to regret.

Yet Anne Boleyn sighed as she replaced the cover, and her dark eyes gloomed. Much will have more, and she was not satisfied. Nor was she so beautiful when the corners of her mouth dropped and knowing there was none to see she let her face relax into discontent and anger. She had seen in the glass what she never forgot—what Mary’s cruel thrust had lanced—a blemish that had coloured her very character and dyed it in grain since the first day she had realized her burden.

A double row of strangely carved and scented black and golden beads lay about her beautiful slender throat—but between them, thus anxiously hidden, an enlargement like an incipient goitre—small, unobservable except naked and in profile—but still—there! A flaw in perfection and the harder to bear. How she loathed it—how she sickened at the pure outline of her sister’s throat, no tongue could tell—none but herself ever guessed. They forgot it. Mary had never spoken of it since they were children, but she remembered, was conscious of it every time she wreathed that graceful neck so gracefully. The thought was a bleeding wound. And that was not all.—Why did she wear sleeves falling in drapery from the shoulder which gave her the look of a winged thing as she glided to and fro through the great halls at Blickling and Hever Castle? Her disgrace—as she thought it, in sickening angry solitude. On the left hand a little blemish—a tiny indication of a sixth finger beneath the fifth. A man who had heard her described by a lover says—“But that which in others might be regarded as a defect was to her an occasion of additional grace by the skilful manner in which she concealed it from observation.”

Easily written but how far from true perception! She never forgot it. She writhed under it. What use to play divinely on the lute or virginals, to sing with eyes uplifted in love’s own passion or in archest most inciting comedy (and in both she excelled) when all the time she was thinking—“Do they see? Are they thinking?” How could she forget that when a child she had heard her nurse whisper to another, “Look at her hand, her throat—the devil’s marks in her body. She will come to a bad end—the devil’s own brat! Her rages are like his own.” She had never forgotten that poisonous whisper, and though churchyard grass covered the whisperer she heard it in every tone, saw it in every look that she could not read to the bottom. She was set apart from other women. But it cut two ways. It made her a finished actress in all she said and did, a flowing changing creature of graces carried to absolute perfection, for she must be exquisite to cover this curse, and exquisite she was. But warped, abnormal, under it all, the loneliest girl in England, forever on the defensive, hard with fear, bold with shame. And not a soul knew her for what she really was.

What was she? She did not know herself, and that must wait for Time’s moulding fingers.

Now, left alone by the sobbing Mary, she looked about her sharply and at last lifted a little silver whistle that hung among her toys and blew a bird’s note upon it, then waited.

Far off a man’s step in the woods, the crashing of twigs and brushing of leaves, and presently the boughs parted and he came out into the open and springing to her fell on his knees beside her as she sat. Thomas Wyatt, poet and courtier.

Pale, with a mobile sensitive face, grey eyes, and brown hair in queer waves about his forehead. He had a trick of tossing them back as impatiently as a horse his forelock, always eager, always impatient to hurry after the next thought beyond the one he was thinking at the moment, never overtaking the beauty that was ever on before—her first adorer, the first of how many who were to live and die for her!

“As you sit there in green you look like the dark spirit of the pines,” he said passionately. “While I waited and—God! how you kept me waiting!—for I came over from Allington at dawn—I was choosing your tree. Not a beech in all its glory of green—nor an elm—nor a blossomed chestnut—but that lovely slender pine on the hill that has left the crowded woods to be alone. Anne, sweetheart, you are always alone, winter and summer, shine and snow. Let me into your secret! Let me! I have known your moods since you walked in leading-strings and——”

“You never knew one of them!” she said curtly. “I have no moods. I go straight on. People with moods divagate and wander, to one thing constant never. I am constant——”

“Not to me!” he said bitterly, “though once you let me believe—once you forced me to believe——”

She broke into a sunshiny smile.

“Once I let you believe!—and you a poet! Well, I am a poet too, and what I let you believe opened all the harps of heaven to you. And you reproach me! You that can write like an angel.—Indeed you have set your name on the scroll of English poets already. And your first verses were to me. And this is your thanks! I made you indeed!”

That was true. In the old Hall of Blickling, in the pleasances of Hever, in the gardens, in the deep green wells of the wood—green like translucent sea-water, those three—Anne, her brother George Boleyn, and Thomas Wyatt grew up inseparable as a trefoil on one stem. They wrote their verses together and in competition—each setting the subject in turn.

One might judge each by those subjects and the way they dealt with them, for the girl and boys came round each to his own whatever subject was set. Wyatt’s were of love—love. His youthful verses hung there insistent as a cricket’s chirp, but deepening as he grew older. Anne was his Muse—those long amber eyes with the yellow sparkles when she roused and kindled, the beautiful proud lips—with the singular depth between under-lip and rounded chin which gave so much character to her face, the musing sternness of expression—unlike a girl, which flashed into such sweetness or pride at a breath that he held his own to see it—to all these his words and he clung as a bee to clover blossoms, and when his gentle sister Mary rode over from Allington to spend a night at Hever, awed and dazzled by the glitter of young Anne she would whisper in his ear:

“If you could win her, Thomas, you would set the world flaming with your love-verses. But she will soar too high for us!”

That Wyatt did not believe and had his own reasons for disbelief. Anne was lovely but not inaccessible to the lover. Far from it. To the poet always inaccessible. Always some barrier however near he came—the dark side of the moon hidden behind light that he and all the world might bathe in. For to him she was Beauty—and who holds Beauty a prisoner in words?

For George—his verses ran to the sinister and cynical. The death’s head must be wreathed with budding roses. The lily must have a maggot in her heart. Thomas told him and truly that this was Italianate;—an unwholesome miasma from all the new splendour and crime in the country of the great learning and riches. They had both visited Italy, and George had brought home its sardonic humour with him.

And Anne, her eyes deepened over all their verses. Hers were on the model of the French poets she read with Simonette, trilling rhymes for lute and harp—as often French as English, for Simonette taught well. And so, like birds in a nest they would chipper and chatter and be glad and sad and kind and fierce and hustle one another like scratch-cats all in a few minutes. And if Wyatt did not know her who should? And yet he knew he did not.

“I made you!” she repeated. At all events she knew him.

“Do I deny it? I had rather you made me than the Almighty,” he said with profane tenderness. “Only, having made me, keep me—if but to be your caged linnet. And tell me, why did Mary run away crying? I saw her.”

Anne replied with the kind of haughty contempt Mary inspired in her always.

“Because I reproached her with the King and the little fool was ashamed.”

A moment’s silence, and then he touched the fair right hand that lay like a blossom on the rough bark.

“Heart’s delight, we should not be too virtuous! The poor sweet child! How could she say No to the King? You who are above every lover even if he possessed you—should you rebuke her because she has no art in denying? And if so——”

For all answer she opened her eyes upon him and laughed. And Wyatt thought he knew her! What use to explain? Presently—having allowed time to the blackbird for his last roulade, she said as if reflecting deeply:

“What like is the King, Thomas? Mary weeps like a November drizzle when I ask and is speechless. My father says—a big tall man—who will be gross one day, but finely featured and a majestic presence. What more?”

“Much more,” Wyatt answered thoughtfully. “Fair-skinned, golden-haired, hawk-eyed, but eats and drinks more than enough, and already it has smurred the outlines. His attraction is his geniality—a jollier hail-fellow-well-met you never knew. But beware! for he can leap back into the King and you shudder beneath the lion’s paw in a horrid minute. His mind a jumble of romance and sordid trickishness and overbearing lordship and lust and majesty and brutality. He writes verses not despicable and orders a man to the scaffold if he obstructs the view. The ideal sparring with the gross and getting a daily fall. A coarse speaker and doer, but one women are mad for. Very male of very male, and if he stoops to conquer lets them know (if they have eyes) that they will do the kneeling later. In short, a master to all but himself.”

She turned this over in her mind, then asked:

“And the Queen?”

“A handsome woman once, now too large and heavy. It matches a kind of noble heaviness in her nature. O, she points to heaven true as the pole-star to the North. I like that massiveness of nobility in her—it puts weight on the side of all that is worthy. She is a great Spanish princess and Queen of England, and it makes her pride a high virtue so that her own nature obliges her to nobilities she cannot escape if she would. She has no wings but she can walk on thorns smiling. But why do you ask, sweetheart?”

She wreathed her long throat and looked at him over her shoulder most sweetly but with entire incomprehension of his words.

“Prepare to weep, True Thomas! I am sick of Hever Castle already, sicker of Blickling. I have already moved my father to get me a place at Court. Why not? My own mother would have seen to it had she been alive. My stepmother is dull and low-born and she thinks of nothing. She has not the breeding of us great folk. I like her well enough;—but after France, to be shut up with her here and with Mary——”

She paused and looked at him sidelong.

Sick of the glories of Blickling—and so soon! His mind stranded on that like a ship on a rock and so stayed. Sick of the noble amplitudes of glade and meadow and the running streams and golden shields of buttercups defying the noonday sun! Sick of the past. Forgetting the young love and joy and all their April of life together—cruel! No memory softened her bright taunting eyes, golden and hard as a falcon’s. Suddenly a suspicion shot through his brain. He darkened.

“And this is why you must hear of the King?”

She laughed him off.

“Only because he is the King and the green gosling’s lover. The Queen I saw—and the King too, long ago, when I went over with the Princess Mary his sister when she married the old French king. But I swear my head was so full of France that I never gave a thought to either—child that I was. Just fourteen. And now I am twenty and a wiseacre.”

“But, God-a-mercy, have you not had your fill of courts?” he asked, aghast—he hated the thought of her going among the loose lavish men and women who made up the Court in London. In France—no more innocence—God knows!—but yet a kind of witty delicacy and refinement wholly lacking in London. She seemed to him a gay heedless white-sailed barque, laden with incalculable treasure in gold and heaven’s own jewels, ready to adventure among gross plunderers who could not even gauge the value of what they looted.

“Stay here!” he said beseechingly.

“Here! And grow all over moss and mildew! My good Thomas—you little know what I was in Paris! The good Queen Claude was nothing beside me. Men bowed to her but they followed me. O, I remember—it was one night. A masquerade. We danced. My dress—pure fancy of my own—and Simonette’s—but lovely. A cape of blue velvet starred with gold, and a long coat of blue watered silk lined with ermine—long drifting sleeves. Blue velvet shoes with a diamond star on each, and wide gold wings on my head that framed my face in gold. I called myself the Court Fool—and mercy! how King Francis laughed at the songs and jests I made to amuse them. The whole Court sat round me and laughed. I ask you!—True Thomas, would you bury all that in the Hever meadows? I tell you the King complained to the English Ambassador because I would stay in Paris no longer. But how could I? If kings will fight, poor pretty women must scurry to shelter.”

He looked at her in a kind of dismay. She was so haughty, like a proud falcon who may perch on a man’s wrist but with her golden eyes always away, searching the sky for prey. He had not remembered this aloofness. Certainly it had grown on her in France. And who could wonder? England was not likely to be ignorant of the English girl who had trained fashion to be English and made the greatest French nobles—even King Francis himself—dance to her sweet pipings.

“Don’t pull such a long face!” she said. “Use your wits, man! We Boleyns have crept up in the world from my old mercer great-grandfather until my father could marry my mother—the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter. I am half Howard. We have good Irish blood in us too from the Ormonds. I wish I could marry my first cousin Surrey—the Duke’s eldest son—Anne Surrey! Beautiful. But I am nothing to him. We were children together, and that cuts love.”

“Does it?” Wyatt asked bitterly. He knew better. He had adored Anne when she was promoted to her first pony.

“It should, anyway!” said Anne candidly. “But you see how it is. My brother George needs promotion. And Mary has disgraced us—the fool! So I wrote to my father—he is always in London—a good Mistress Mouse letter saying I must bear my share of family troubles and surely my experience of courts would not be wasted now. I knew I could trust him to set off my little play-tricks, for he was not born yesterday and likes this world’s goods as well as another. Well—last night comes his messenger. Allow me, sir, to present to you Mademoiselle Anne de Boleyn, niece to my lord the Duke of Norfolk, maid of honour to the Queen’s Majesty and leader of the revels at the Court of his Majesty King Henry the Eighth.”

She got up and holding her skirts out executed a prodigious curtsey and sat down again laughing like the ripples of a brook. Indeed her laughter never had warmth. It was a cold crystal sweetness. It drove him wild.

“Anne—no—no!” he cried, and caught at her hands, but she pulled them away. “You shall not go, I swear it. After Mary’s business—it is not fitting you should go. They will laugh—they will watch.”

“Boors! Let them! I could drive them before me in regiments—I who know France!” she said, laughing. Her audacity shocked and charmed him, but yet he quivered to think of her among the lewd intrigues, the men that no graceful quips could repel, the surging overbearing passions;—what could a lovely girl of twenty do to protect herself if——

But still she laughed. Did he suppose that Simonette—the invaluable all-seeing Simonette, friend of every waiting-woman in France and England—had not given her a carte du pays of London as well as Paris? She said as much, and he burst out:

“You have no heart. You value no one. You would see spots in the sun if you could look at him, and like him the better for it. You and Mary are alike—and God! how different. Mary——”

She laughed with perfect good-humour.

“If you prefer Mary, love Mary—write verses for her! She will be grateful for a little kindness to patch up her pride!”

“She is more innocent than you in spite of her broken pride. And yet——No! With your love of lovely words and sounds, you could be a crowned angel, Anne, leading the choir of Beauty.”

His eyes glowed on her. “God, how you will be lonely at Court!” he said. “There, their aims are brutish. They will stare at you with great eyes and will not understand. They will turn your gold to withered leaves like a spell read backward.”

Sure of herself she looked at him with a lovely perception of his meaning. The soft beam warmed his chilled heart—so quick to believe and forgive.

“Believe in me and make me what you believe. Paint the fair picture, True Thomas, and I shall grow like it. That is the truth under the jesting. But now listen. Be near me in London. And why? I want to gather about me a little band—not myself only but you and my brother George and my cousin Surrey and—well, you shall know later. But we will set the tune and the Court shall dance and the King find us more heartening than the Court fool and—I have not the Irish strain of gaiety in me to let it rust for want of use.”

But he was not dazzled. He hesitated and said:

“Does Simonette go with you?”

“How otherwise? I must have a companion not above stitching and copying and patching. We are not too rich, God knows. And she is Paris-trained and has the finest taste in the world. A French girl above all!”

He said suddenly:

“I hate Simonette. I smell corruption when she goes by.”

She rose instantly and walked off—her head tossed up with as much pride as if it were a crown. She swept down the glade over the glittering kingcups as if a brocade train six yards long flowed after her. For a minute she loathed Wyatt. Simonette was her slave and indispensable. That he should dare! And yet—yet—uneasiness stirred in her heart as when a little green snake for a second rears its head among the grass blades and then sinks it and is gone—only a ripple tracing its sinuous way beneath the green shelter. Her secrets, such as they were, were all in the firm cold clasp of Simonette, whose hands even on the hottest August day were as cold as her heart. But you knew what to count on and were not disturbed! Thomas Wyatt strode after her.

“Anne, forgive me. I know nothing of her. A man must not wrong a woman, and I suppose she loves you well.”

She turned on her foot and looked at him hardily.

“I could not swear to that. Simonette is honest. She does not pretend to those blossoms of the heart with which men and women dress out their selfishness. Look at you! You make a divine mystery of love, but what all the fine words cover is the natural desire of a man for a woman. Suppose the smallpox caught me and seamed my smooth skin and blurred my eyes. No; Simonette says, ‘Mademoiselle Anne, the world belongs more to wit than beauty. You have both. I have no beauty but I have wits as clean-cut as daggers. Where is the height to which we cannot climb? Therefore I love to serve you. Were you like Mademoiselle Mary your sister——’ ”

Wyatt made a gesture of disgust.

“Faugh!—and you talk of Mary to that wench! Poor Mary! Anne, I beseech you——”

“All the world talks of Mary!” she shot at him, and was gone in earnest now, running as smooth and swift as a boy, with her skirts picked up high.

From behind a tree further up emerged a young woman of about thirty, plump and full-breasted, olive complexion set off by bright black eyes and hair. Her lips were full, moist and scarlet, but she was only provocative, not handsome, too fat and moon-faced and the threat of a double chin already. But none the less she wore her flowered dress beautifully and could draw eyes. She turned a curious fixed gaze on Wyatt for a moment, and then Anne thrust her arm through Simonette’s and they went off together, whispering.