st four, so as to
elude the guards who were placed in the streets; and also because King
Henry in the summer went very early to mass, and then to some out-of-
door sport. Randall said he would have taken his own good woman to have
the care of the little mistress, but that the poor little orphan Spanish
wench had wept herself so sick, that she could not be left to a
stranger.

Master Headley himself brought the child by back streets to the river,
and thence down to the Temple stairs, accompanied by Tibble Steelman,
and a maidservant on whose presence her grandmother had insisted.
Dennet had hardly slept all night for excitement and perturbation, and
she looked very white, small, and insignificant for her thirteen years,
when Randall and Ambrose met her, and placed her carefully in the barge
which was to take them to Richmond. It was somewhat fresh in the very
early morning, and no one was surprised that Master Randall wore a large
dark cloak as they rowed up the river. There was very little speech
between the passengers; Dennet sat between Ambrose and Tibble. They
kept their heads bowed. Ambrose's brow was on one hand, his elbow on
his knee, but he spared the other to hold Dennet. He had been longing
for the old assurance he would once have had, that to vow himself to a
life of hard service in a convent would be the way to win his brother's
life; but he had ceased to be able to feel that such bargains were the
right course, or that a convent necessarily afforded sure way of
service, and he never felt more insecure of the way and means to prayer
than in this hour of anguished supplication.

When they came beyond the City, within sight of the trees of Sheen, as
Richmond was still often called, Randall insisted that Dennet should eat
some of the bread and meat that Tibble had brought in a wallet for her.
"She must look her best," he said aside to the foreman. "I would that
she were either more a babe or better favoured! Our Hal hath a tender
heart for a babe and an eye for a buxom lass."

He bade the maid trim up the child's cap and make the best of her array,
and presently reached some stairs leading up to the park. There he let
Ambrose lift her out of the boat. The maid would fain have followed,
but he prevented this, and when she spoke of her mistress having bidden
her follow wherever the child went, Tibble interfered, telling her that
his master's orders were that Master Randall should do with her as he
tho