much service hath of late fallen to Cicely and myself, and she shares
the Queen's chamber."

Humfrey had to submit to exchange good-nights with Cicely, and she made
her way less willingly than usual to the apartments of the Queen, who
was being made ready for her bed. "Here comes our truant," she
exclaimed as the maiden entered. "I sent to rescue thee from the
western seafarer who had clawed thee in his tarry clutch. Thou didst
act the sister's part passing well. I hear my Lord and all his meine
have been sitting, open-mouthed, hearkening to his tales of savages and
cannibals."

"O madam, he told us of such lovely isles," said Cis. "The sea, he
said, is blue, bluer than we can conceive, with white waves of dazzling
surf, breaking on islands fringed with white shells and coral, and with
palms, their tops like the biggest ferns in the brake, and laden with
red golden fruit as big as goose eggs. And the birds! O madam, my
mother, the birds! They are small, small as our butterflies and
beetles, and they hang hovering and quivering over a flower so that
Humfrey thought they were moths, for he saw nothing but a whizzing and
a whirring till he smote the pretty thing dead, and then he said that I
should have wept for pity, for it was a little bird with a long bill,
and a breast that shines red in one light, purple in another, and
flame-coloured in a third. He has brought home the little skin and
feathers of it for me."

"Thou hast supped full of travellers' tales, my simple child."

"Yea, madam, but my Lord listened, and made Humfrey sit beside him, and
made much of him--my Lord himself! I would fain bring him to you,
madam. It is so wondrous to hear him tell of the Red Men with crowns
of feathers and belts of beads. Such gentle savages they be, and their
chiefs as courteous and stately as any of our princes, and yet those
cruel Spaniards make them slaves and force them to dig in mines, so
that they die and perish under their hands."

"And better so than that they should not come to the knowledge of the
faith," said Mary.

"I forgot that your Grace loves the Spaniards," said Cis, much in the
tone in which she might have spoken of a taste in her Grace for
spiders, adders, or any other noxious animal.

"One day my child will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and
learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy
Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate
days