also that I am a very poor man who craves very much for money. For I
love good books that cost much gold; comely women that cost far more;
succulent meats, sweet wines, high piled fires and warm furs.'

He smacked his lips thinking of these same things.

'I am, in short, no stoic,' he said, 'the stoics being ancient
curmudgeons that were low-stomached.' Now, he continued, the Old Faith
he loved well, but not over well; the Protestants he called busy
knaves, but the New Learning he loved beyond life. Cromwell thwacked
the Old Faith; he loved him not for that. Cromwell upheld in a sort
the Protestants; he little loved him for that. 'But the New Learning
he loveth, and, oh fair sharer of my dreams o' nights, Cromwell
holdeth the strings of the money-bags.'

She scratched her cheek meditatively, and then unfolded her arms.

'How then ha' ye come by his broad pieces?'

'It is three years since,' he answered, 'that Privy Seal sent for me.
I had been cast out of my mastership at Eton College, for they
said--foul liars said--that I had stolen the silver salt-cellars.' He
had been teaching, for his sins, in the house of the Lord Edmund
Howard, where he had had his best pupil, but no more salary than what
his belly could hold of poor mutton. 'So Privy Seal did send for
me----'

'Kat Howard was thy best pupil?' his wife asked meditatively.

'By the shrine of Saint Eloi--' he commenced to swear.

'Nay, lie not,' she cut him short. 'You love Kat Howard and six other
wenches. I know it well. What said Privy Seal?'

He meditated again to protest that he loved not Katharine, but her
quiet stolidity set him to change his mind.

'It was that the Lady Mary of England needed a preceptor, an
amanuensis, an aid for her studies in the learned language.' For the
King's Highness' daughter had a great learning and was agate of
writing a commentary of Plautus his plays. But the Lady Mary hated
also virulently--and with what cause all men know--the King her
father. And for years long, since the death of the Queen her
mother--whom God preserve in Paradise!--for years long the Lady Mary
had maintained a treasonable correspondence with the King's enemies,
with the Emperor, with the Bishop of Rome----

'Our Holy Father the Pope,' his wife said, and crossed herself.

'And with this King here of France,' Udal continued, whilst he too
crossed himself with graceful waves of his brown hand. He continued to
report that the way in which the La