ill Cavendish, who had expected at least some time to be asked
for deliberation, and knew his mother would expect her permission to be
requested.

"I may not choose but do so," replied Richard; and then, thinking he
might have said too much, he added, "It were sheer cruelty to deny any
solace to the poor lady."

"Sick and in prison, and balked by her only son," added Susan, "one's
heart cannot but ache for her."

"Let not Mr. Secretary Walsingham hear you say so, good madam," said
Cavendish, smiling. "In London they think of her solely as a kind of
malicious fury shut up in a cage, and there were those who looked
askance at me when I declared that she was a gentlewoman of great
sweetness and kindness of demeanour. I believe myself they will not
rest till they have her blood!"

Cis and Susan cried out with horror, and Babington with stammering
wrath demanded whether she was to be assassinated in the Spanish
fashion, or on what pretext a charge could be brought against her.
"Well," Cavendish answered, "as the saying is, give her rope enough,
and she will hang herself. Indeed, there's no doubt but that she
tampered enough with Throckmorton's plot to have been convicted of
misprision of treason, and so she would have been, but that her most
sacred Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, would have no charge made against her.

"Treason from one sovereign to another, that is new law!" said
Babington.

"So to speak," said Richard; "but if she claim to be heiress to the
crown, she must also be a subject. Heaven forefend that she should
come to the throne!"

To which all except Cis and Babington uttered a hearty amen, while a
picture arose before the girl of herself standing beside her royal
mother robed in velvet and ermine on the throne, and of the faces of
Lady Shrewsbury and her daughter as they recognised her, and were
pardoned.

Cavendish presently took his leave, and carried the unwilling Babington
off with him, rightly divining that the family would wish to make their
arrangements alone. To Richard's relief, Babington had brought him no
private message, and to Cicely's disappointment, there was no addition
in sympathetic ink to her letter, though she scorched the paper brown
in trying to bring one out. The Scottish Queen was much too wary to
waste and risk her secret expedients without necessity.

To Richard and Susan this was the real resignation of their
foster-child into the hands of her own parent. It was true t