That same hour the Queen sent for Angele, and by no leave, save her own,
arranged the wedding-day, and ordained that it should take place at
Southampton, whither the Comtesse de Montgomery had come on her way to
Greenwich to plead for the life of Michel de la Foret, and to beg
Elizabeth to relieve her poverty. Both of which things Elizabeth did,
as the annals of her life record.

After Elizabeth--ever self-willed--had declared her way about the
marriage ceremony, looking for no reply save that of silent obedience,
she made Angele sit at her feet and tell her whole story again from first
to last. They were alone, and Elizabeth showed to this young refugee
more of her own heart than any other woman had ever seen. Not by words
alone, for she made no long story; but once she stooped and kissed Angele
upon the cheek, and once her eyes filled up with tears, and they dropped
upon her lap unheeded. All the devotion shown herself as a woman had
come to naught; and it may be that this thought stirred in her now. She
remembered how Leicester and herself had parted, and how she was denied
all those soft resources of regret which were the right of the meanest
women in her realm. For, whatever she might say to her Parliament and
people, she knew that all was too late--that she would never marry and
that she must go childless and uncomforted to her grave. Years upon
years of delusion of her people, of sacrifice to policy, had at last
become a self-delusion, to which her eyes were not full opened yet--she
sought to shut them tight. But these refugees, coming at the moment of
her own struggle, had changed her heart from an ever-growing bitterness
to human sympathy. When Angele had ended her tale once more, the Queen
said:

"God knows, ye shall not linger in my Court. Such lives have no place
here. Get you back to my Isle of Jersey, where ye may live in peace.