faces.

In a bower at the south end of the small garden Katharine Howard sat
to play cat's-cradle with the old lady of Rochford. This foolish game
and this foolish old woman, with her unceasing tales of the Queen Anne
Boleyn--who had been her cousin--gave to Katharine a great feeling of
ease. With her troubled eyes and weary expression, her occasional
groans as the rheumatism gnawed at her joints, the old lady minded her
of the mother she had so seldom seen. She had always been somewhere
away, all through Katharine's young years, planning and helping her
father to advancement that never came, and hopeless to control her
wild children. Thus Katharine had come to love this poor old woman and
consorted much with her, for she was utterly bewildered to control the
Lady Mary's maids that were beneath her care.

Katharine held out her hands, parallel, as if she were praying, with
the strand of blue wool and silver cord criss-cross and diagonal
betwixt her fingers. The old lady bent above them, silent and puzzled,
to get the key to the strings. Twice she protruded her gouty fingers,
with swollen ends; and twice she drew them back to stroke her brows.

'I mind,' she said suddenly, 'that I played cat's-cradle with my
cousin Anne, that was a sinful queen.' She bent again and puzzled
about the strings. 'In those days I had a great skill, I mind. We
revised it to the eleventh change many times before her death.' Again
she leant forward and again back. 'I did come near my death, too,' she
added.

Katharine's eyes had been gazing past her; suddenly she asked:

'Was Anne Boleyn loved after she grew to be Queen?'

The old woman's face took on a palsied and haunted look.

'God help you!' she said; 'do you ask that?' and she glanced round her
furtively in an agony of apprehension. Something had drawn all the gay
gowns and embroidered stomachers towards the higher terrace. They were
all alone in the arbour.

'Why,' Katharine said, 'so many innocent creatures have been done to
death since Cromwell came, that, though she was lewd before and a
heretic all her days, I think doubts may be.'

The old lady pressed her hand upon her bosom where her heart beat.

'Madam Howard,' she said, 'for my life I know not the truth of the
matter. There was much trickery; God knoweth the truth.'

Katharine mused for a moment above the cat's-cradle on her fingers.
Near the joint at the end of the little one there was a small mole.

'Take you the f