farm of a hundred
pounds by the year. I hear you are a rough honest man. I had rather ye
were about my nephew's courts than mine. Get you to Edinbro'.' He
waved his hand to Throckmorton. 'See him disposed,' he said.

Culpepper uttered a sound of remonstrance. The King leaned forward in
his seat and thundered:

'Get you gone. Be you this night thirty miles towards the Northland. I
ha' heard ye ha' made brawls and broils here. See you be gone. By God,
I am Harry of Windsor!'

He laid the heavy flat of the sword like a blow upon the green
shoulders below him.

'Rise up, Sir Thomas Culpepper,' he said. 'Get you gone!'

Dazed and trembling still a little, Culpepper stuttered his way to the
door. When he came by her Katharine cast her arms about his shoulder.

'Poor Tom,' she cried. 'Best it is for thee and me that thou goest.
Here thou hast no place.' He shook his head like a man in a daze and
was gone.

'Art too patient with the springald,' the King said.

He thundered 'Body of God!' again when he saw Throckmorton once more
fall to his knees.

'Sire,' he said--and for the first time he faltered in his level
tones--'a very great treason has come to my ken this day!'

'Holy altar fires!' the King growled, 'let your treasons wait. Here
hath this lady been talking to me very reasonably of a golden age.'

'Sire,' Throckmorton said, and he leant one hand on the floor to
support him. 'This is a very great treason of men arming to sustain
Privy Seal against thee! I have seen it; with mine own eyes I have
seen it in thy town of London.'

Katharine cried out, 'Ah!'

The King leapt to his feet.

'Ho, I will arm,' he said, and grew pale. For, with a sword in his
hand or where fighting was, this King had middling little fear. But,
even as the lion dreads a little mouse, so he feared secret
rebellions.

'Sire,' Throckmorton said, and his face was towards Katharine as if he
challenged her:

'This is the very truth of the very truth, I call upon what man will
to gainsay me. This day I heard in the city of London, at the house of
the printer, John Badge----' and he repeated the speech of the
saturnine man--'that "_he would raise a thousand prentices and a
thousand journeymen to shield Privy Seal from peril; that he could
raise ten thousand citizens and ten thousand tenned again from the
shires!_"'

Katharine kept her eyes upon Throckmorton who, knowing her power to
sway the King, nodded gravely and looked into her e