ves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your
Sovereign.'

That sovereign could scarcely be expected to take the same view, and for
the last time the Queen sent for Knox. No one knew so well as she that
he had laid his finger on the true hinge of the political question, and
that her opponent would have a far stronger case now than at any of
their previous interviews. She burst into tears the moment he entered.
'I have borne with you,' she said most truly, 'in all your rigorous
manner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means.'
'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers
controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended
at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not
wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the
generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood
and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had
at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own
so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with
my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself
invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the
pulpit, where he had to speak to the nobility and to think of the good
of the whole commonwealth.

'What have you to do,' she persisted, 'with my marriage? or what are you
within this commonwealth?'

'A subject born within the same,' said he, 'Madam. And albeit I neither
be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me (how abject that
ever I be in your eyes) a profitable member within the same.'

Under the new discipline the preacher claimed a right to utter opinions
even as to private marriages, and used it much beyond what the
fundamental principles of Protestantism could justify. But Knox was now
dealing with his Queen, and he felt himself well within the line of his
duty in repeating to herself the deadly consequences to Scotland if its
nobility ever consented to her being 'subject to an unfaithful husband.'
It was unanswerable, except by a new passion of tears, under which the
Reformer stood at first silent and unmoved. He broke silence at last
with a clumsy attempt to explain or to console; and Mary's indignation
was not diminished by Knox's quaint protest that he was really a
tenderhearted man, and could scarcely bear to see his own children weep
wh