t
so far as to volunteer one day that he would not have brought Mistress
Cicely into the matter if there had been any other sure way of getting
the letter delivered in his absence.

"Ah, boy!" returned Richard, "when once we swerve from the open and
direct paths, there is no saying into what tangles we may bring
ourselves and others."

Antony winced a little, and said, "Whoever says I lied, lies in his
throat."

"No one hath said thou wert false in word, but how as to thy deed?"

"Sir," said Antony, "surely when a high emprise and great right is to
be done, there is no need to halt over such petty quibbles."

"Master Babington, no great right was ever done through a little wrong.
Depend on it, if you cannot aid without a breach of trust, it is the
sure sign that it is not the will of God that you should be the one to
do it."

Captain Talbot mused whether he should convince or only weary the lad
by an argument he had once heard in a sermon, that the force of Satan's
temptation to our blessed Lord, when showing Him all the kingdoms of
the world, must have been the absolute and immediate vanishing of all
kinds of evil, by a voluntary abdication on the part of the Prince of
this world, instead not only of the coming anguish of the strife, but
of the long, long, often losing, battle which has been waging ever
since. Yet for this great achievement He would not commit the moment's
sin. He was just about to begin when Antony broke in, "Then, sir, you
do deem it a great wrong?"

"That I leave to wiser heads than mine," returned the sailor. "My duty
is to obey my Lord, his duty is to obey her Grace. That is all a plain
man needs to see."

"But an if the true Queen be thus mewed up, sir?" asked Antony. Richard
was too wise a man to threaten the suggestion down as rank treason,
well knowing that thus he should never root it out.

"Look you here, Antony," he said; "who ought to reign is a question of
birth, such as neither of us can understand nor judge. But we know
thus much, that her Grace, Queen Elizabeth, hath been crowned and
anointed and received oaths of fealty as her due, and that is quite
enough for any honest man."

"Even when she keeps in durance the Queen, who came as her guest in
dire distress?"

"Nay, Master Antony, you are not old enough to remember that the
durance began not until the Queen of Scots tried to form a party for
herself among the English liegemen. And didst thou know, thou simple
la