heart cannot but ache for her."

"Let not Mr. Secretary Walsingham hear you say so, good madam," said
Cavendish, smiling. "In London they think of her solely as a kind of
malicious fury shut up in a cage, and there were those who looked
askance at me when I declared that she was a gentlewoman of great
sweetness and kindness of demeanour. I believe myself they will not
rest till they have her blood!"

Cis and Susan cried out with horror, and Babington with stammering
wrath demanded whether she was to be assassinated in the Spanish
fashion, or on what pretext a charge could be brought against her.
"Well," Cavendish answered, "as the saying is, give her rope enough,
and she will hang herself. Indeed, there's no doubt but that she
tampered enough with Throckmorton's plot to have been convicted of
misprision of treason, and so she would have been, but that her most
sacred Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, would have no charge made against
her.

"Treason from one sovereign to another, that is new law!" said
Babington.

"So to speak," said Richard; "but if she claim to be heiress to the
crown, she must also be a subject. Heaven forefend that she should
come to the throne!"

To which all except Cis and Babington uttered a hearty amen, while a
picture arose before the girl of herself standing beside her royal
mother robed in velvet and ermine on the throne, and of the faces of
Lady Shrewsbury and her daughter as they recognised her, and were