ing interest, and come off crestfallen, as
all other men had done. But that Mary should love Brandon, and he
remain heart-whole, was an unlooked-for event--one that would hardly
have been predicted by the shrewdest prophet.

What Lady Jane said troubled me greatly, as it was but the
confirmation of my own fears. Her opportunity to know was far better
than mine, but I had seen enough to set me thinking.

Brandon, I believe, saw nothing of Mary's growing partiality at all.
He could not help but find her wonderfully attractive and interesting,
and perhaps it needed only the thought that she might love him, to
kindle a flame in his own breast. But at the time of our ride to
Windsor, Charles Brandon was not in love with Mary Tudor, however near
it he may unconsciously have been. He would whistle and sing, and was
as light-hearted as a lark--I mean when away from the princess as well
as with her--a mood that does not go with a heart full of heavy love,
of impossible, fatal love, such as his would have been for the first
princess of the first blood royal of the world.

But another's trouble could not dim the sunlight in my own heart, and
that ride to Windsor was the happiest day of my life up to that time.
Even Jane threw off the little cloud our forebodings had gathered,
and chatted and laughed like the creature of joy and gladness she was.
Now and then her heart would well up so full of the sunlight and the
flowers, and the birds in the hedge, aye, and of the contagious love
in my heart, too, that it poured itself forth in a spontaneous little
song which thrills me even now.

Ahead of us were the princess and Brandon. Every now and then her
voice came back to us in a stave of a song, and her laughter, rich and
low, wafted on the wings of the soft south wind, made the glad birds
hush to catch its silvery note. It seemed that the wild flowers had
taken on their brightest hue, the trees their richest Sabbath-day
green, and the sun his softest radiance, only to gladden the heart of
Mary that they might hear her laugh. The laugh would have come quite
as joyously had the flowers been dead and the sun black, for flowers
and sunlight, south wind, green pastures and verdant hills, all were
riding by her side. Poor Mary! Her days of laughter were numbered.

We all rode merrily on to Windsor, and when we arrived it was curious
to see the great nobles, Buckingham, both the Howards, Seymour and a
dozen others stand back for plain Ch