silence.

'Now, by all the gods of high Olympus!' he cried out, 'such things
shall not be alleged against me. For I do swear, before Venus and all
the saints, that I am your man.'

Nevertheless, it was Margot Poins, wavering between her love for her
magister and her love for her mistress, that most truly was carried
away by Katharine's eloquence.

'Mistress,' she said, and she indicated both the magister and his tall
and bearded companion, 'these two have made up a pretty plot upon the
stairs. There are in it papers from Cleves and a matter of deceiving
Privy Seal and thou shouldst be kept in ignorance asking to--to----'

Her gruff voice failed and her blushes overcame her, so that she
wanted for a word. But upon the mention of papers and Privy Seal the
old knight fidgeted and faltered:

'Why, let us begone.' Cicely Elliott glanced from one to the other of
them with a malicious glee, and Throckmorton's eyes blinked
sardonically above his beard.

* * * * *

It had been actually upon the stairs that he had come upon the
magister, newly down from his horse, and both stiff and bruised, with
Margot Poins hanging about his neck and begging him to spare her a
moment. Throckmorton crept up the dark stairway with his shoes soled
with velvet. The magister was seeking to disengage himself from the
girl with the words that he had a treaty form of the Duke of Cleves in
his bosom and must hasten on the minute to give it to her mistress.

'Before God!' Throckmorton had said behind his back, 'ye will do no
such thing,' and Udal had shrieked out like a rabbit caught by a
ferret in its bury. For here he had seemed to find himself caught by
the chief spy of Privy Seal upon a direct treason against Privy Seal's
self.

But, dragging alike the terrified magister and the heavy, blonde girl
who clung to him out from the dark stairhead into the corridor, where,
since no one could come upon them unseen or unheard, it was the safest
place in the palace to speak, Throckmorton had whispered into his ear
a long, swift speech in which he minced no matters at all.

The time, he said, was ripe to bring down Privy Seal. He
himself--Throckmorton himself--loved Kat Howard with a love compared
to which the magister's was a rushlight such as you bought fifty for a
halfpenny. Privy Seal was ravening for a report of that treaty. They
must, before all things, bring him a report that was false. For, for
sure, upon tha