to his care. She
obstinately refused to touch it. Shirley had even had recourse to
stratagem: affecting ignorance on many points concerning which the Queen
desired information, and suggesting that doubtless she would find those
matters fully explained in his Lordship's letter. The artifice was in
vain, and the discussion was, on the whole, unsatisfactory. Yet there is
no doubt that the Queen had had the worst of the argument, and she was
far too sagacious a politician not to feel the weight of that which had
been urged so often in defence of the course pursued. But it was with her
partly a matter of temper and offended pride, perhaps even of wounded
affection.

On the following morning Shirley saw the Queen walking in the garden of
the palace, and made bold to accost her. Thinking, as he said, "to test
her affection to Lord Leicester by another means," the artful Sir Thomas
stepped up to her, and observed that his Lordship was seriously ill. "It
is feared," he said, "that the Earl is again attacked by the disease of
which Dr. Goodrowse did once cure him. Wherefore his Lordship is now a
humble suitor to your Highness that it would please you to spare
Goodrowse, and give him leave to go thither for some time."

The Queen was instantly touched.

"Certainly--with all my heart, with all my heart, he shall have him," she
replied, "and sorry I am that his Lordship hath that need of him."

"And indeed," returned sly Sir Thomas, "your Highness is a very gracious
prince, who are pleased not to suffer his Lordship to perish in health,
though otherwise you remain deeply offended with him."

"You know my mind," returned Elizabeth, now all the queen again, and
perhaps suspecting the trick; "I may not endure that any man should alter
my commission and the authority that I gave him, upon his own fancies and
without me."

With this she instantly summoned one of her gentlemen, in order to break
off the interview, fearing that Shirley was about to enter again upon a
discussion of the whole subject, and again to attempt the delivery of the
Earl's letter.

In all this there was much of superannuated coquetry, no doubt, and much
of Tudor despotism, but there was also a strong infusion of artifice. For
it will soon be necessary to direct attention to certain secret
transactions of an important nature in which the Queen was engaged, and
which were even hidden from the all-seeing eye of Walsingham--although
shrewdly suspected both by th