'How got the magister these papers?' and Throckmorton answered that it
was through the widow that kept the tavern. Cromwell said negligently:

'Let the magister be rewarded with ten crowns a quarter to his fees.
Set it down in my tables'; and then like lightning came the query:

'Do ye believe of her cousin and the Lady Katharine?'

Craving a respite for thought and daring to take none for fear
Cromwell should read him, Throckmorton answered:

'Ye know I think yes.'

'I have said I think no,' Cromwell answered in turn, but
dispassionately as though it were a matter of the courses of stars;
'though it is very certain that her cousin is so mad with love for her
that we had much ado to send him from her to Paris.' He paced three
times from wall to wall and then spoke again:

'Men enow have said she was too fond with her cousin?'

With despair in his heart Throckmorton answered:

'It is the common talk in Lincolnshire where her home is. I have seen
a cub in a cowherd's that was said to be her child by him.'

It was useless to speak otherwise to Privy Seal; if he did not report
these things, twenty others would. But, beneath his impassive face and
his great beard, despair filled him. He might swear treason against
Cromwell to the King; but the King would not hear him alone, and
without the King and Katharine he was a sparrow in Cromwell's hawk's
talons.

'Why,' Cromwell said, 'since Cleves is true to us we will have this
woman down. An he had played us false I would have kept her near the
King.'

This saying, that ran so counter to Throckmorton's schemes, caused him
such dismay that he cried out:

'God forgive us, why?'

Cromwell smiled at him as one who smiles from a great height, and
pointed a finger.

'This is a hard fight,' he said; 'we are in some straits. I trow ye
would have voiced it otherwise.' And then he voiced his own idea--that
so long as Cleves was friends with him Katharine was an enemy; if
Cleves fell away she was none the less an enemy, but she would, from
her love of justice, bear witness to the King that Cromwell was no
traitor. 'And ye shall be very certain,' he added pleasantly, 'that
once men see the King so inclined, they will go to the King saying I
be a traitor, with Protestants like Wriothesley ready to rise and aid
me. In that pass the Lady Katharine should stay by me, in the King's
ear.'

A deep and intolerable dejection overcame Throckmorton and forced from
his lips the wo