confusion, like a child denying its raid on the jam pots, while its
lips and fingers are still sticky with the stolen sweet. "What think
you of my list, sweetheart?" cried she, merrily. "A pair of the silk
stockings and two of the breast-knots and a mask and a flowered
apron shall you have." Then out of the room she whisked abruptly,
laughing from excess of nervous confusion, and not being able to
keep up the farce longer.

Then Catherine turned to me. "She has undone herself, for Madam
Cavendish will see those goods when the Golden Horn comes in, or
ferret the mystery to its farthest hole of hiding," said she. Then
she wrung her hands and cried out sharply, "My God, Harry Wingfield,
what is to be done?"

"Madam Cavendish would surely never betray her own flesh and blood,"
said I, though doubtfully, when I reflected upon her hardness to
Catherine herself, for Madam Judith Cavendish was not one for whom
love could change the colour of the clear light of justice, and she
would see forever her own as they were.

"There is to her no such word as betray except in the service of the
king," said Catherine. Then she added in a whisper, "Know you the
story of her youngest son, my uncle Ralph Cavendish, who went over
to Cromwell?"

I nodded. I knew it well, and had heard it from a lad how Ralph
Cavendish's own mother had turned him from her door one night with
the king's troops in the neighbourhood, though it was afterward
argued that she did not know of that, and he had been taken before
morning and afterwards executed, and she had never said a word nor