otherwise.'

'Who is this?' Wriothesley said. 'I will know who this is that has heard
us.'

'You fool,' Gardiner said; 'this man is of the other side.'

'They have come to you!' Norfolk said.

'To whom else should we come,' the voice answered.

A subtler silence of agitation and thought was between these two men. At
last Gardiner said--

'Tell these lords what you would have of us?'

'We would have these promises,' the voice said; 'first, of you, my Lord
Duke, that if by our endeavours your brother's child be brought to a
trial for unchastity you will in no wise aid her at that trial with your
voice or your encouragement.'

'A trial!' and 'Unchastity!' the Duke said. 'This is a winter madness.
Ye know that my niece--St Kevin curse her for it--is as chaste as the
snow.'

'So was your other niece, Anne Boleyn, for all you knew, yet you dogged
her to death,' Gardiner said. 'Then you plotted with Papists; now it is
the turn of the Lutherans. It is all one, so we are rid of this pest.'

'Well, I will promise it,' the Duke said. 'Ye knew I would. It was not
worth while to ask me.'

'Secondly,' the voice said, 'of you, my Lord Duke, we would have this
service: that you should swear your niece is a much older woman than she
looks. Say, for instance, that she was in truth not the eleventh but the
second child of your brother Edmund. Say that, out of vanity, to make
herself seem more forward with the learned tongues when she was a child,
she would call herself her younger sister that died in childbed.'

'But wherefore?' the Duke said.

'Why,' Gardiner answered, 'this is a very subtle scheme of this
gentleman's devising. He will prove against her certain lewdnesses when
she was a child in your mother's house. If then she was a child of ten
or so, knowing not evil from good, this might not undo her. But if you
can make her seem then eighteen or twenty it will be enough to hang
her.'

Norfolk reflected.

'Well, I will say I heard that of her age,' he said; 'but ye had best
get nurses and women to swear to these things.'

'We have them now,' the voice said. 'And it will suffice if your Grace
will say that you heard these things of old of your brother. For your
Grace will judge this woman.'

'Very willingly I will,' Norfolk said; 'for if I do not soon, she will
utterly undo both me and all my friends.'

He reflected again.

'Those things will I do and more yet, if you will.'

'Why, that will suffice,' the vo