may be,' he said, 'that my sister is rustic and unsuited. I have not
seen her in many years. Therefore, I will not pray too high a place for
her, but only that she and I may be near, the one to the other, upon
occasions, and that she be housed and fed and clothed.'

'Why, that is very well said,' the Queen answered him. 'I will bid my
men to make inquiries into her demeanour and behaviour in the place
where she bides, and if she is well fitted and modest, she shall have a
place about me. If she be too rustic she shall have another place. Get
you gone, gentleman, and a good-night to ye.'

He bent himself half double, in the then newest courtly way, and still
bent, pivoted through the door. The Queen stayed a little while musing.

'Why,' she said, 'when I was a little child I fared very ill, if now I
think of it; but then it seemed a little thing.'

'Y'had best forget it,' the Lady Mary answered.

'Nay,' the Queen said. 'I have known too well what it was to go
supperless to my bed to forget it. A great shadowy place--all shadows,
where the night airs crept in under the rafters.'

She was thinking of the maids' dormitory at her grandmother's, the old
Duchess.

'I am climbed very high,' she said; 'but to think----'

She was such a poor man's child and held of only the littlest account,
herding with the maids and the servingmen's children. At eight by the
clock her grandmother locked her and all the maids--at times there were
but ten, at times as many as a score--into that great dormitory that
was, in fact, nothing but one long attic or grange beneath the bare
roof. And sometimes the maids told tales or slept soon, and sometimes
their gallants, grooms and others, came climbing through the windows
with rope ladders. They would bring pasties and wines and lights, and
coarsely they would revel.

'Why,' she said, 'I had a gallant myself. He was a musician, but I have
forgot his name. Aye, and then there was another, Dearham, I think; but
I have heard he is since dead. He may have been my cousin; we were so
many in family, I have a little forgot.'

She stood still, searching her memory, with her eyes distant. The Lady
Mary surveyed her face with a curious irony.

'Why, what a simple Queen you are!' she said. 'This is something
rustic.'

The Queen joined her hands together before her, as if she caught at a
clue.

'I do remember me,' she said. 'It was a make of a comedy. This Dearham,
calling himself my cousin, bea