ng in my father's letter. Madam, say but you pardon me."

"Of course I pardon you," returned Mary coldly. "I have so much to
pardon that I can well forgive the lukewarmness and precision that are
so bred in your nature that you cannot help them. I pardon injuries,
and I may well try to pardon disappointments. Fare you well, Mr.
Talbot; may your fidelity have its reward from Sir Amias Paulett."

Humfrey was obliged to quit the apartment, cruelly wounded, sometimes
wondering whether he had really acted on a harsh selfish punctilio in
cutting off the dying woman from the consolations of religion, and thus
taking part with the persecutors, while his heart bled for her.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if he had been on the point of earning
her consent to his marriage with her daughter, and had thrown it away,
and at other moments a horror came over him lest he was being beguiled
as poor Antony had been before him. And if he let his faith slip, how
should he meet his father again? Yet his affection for the Queen
repelled this idea like a cruel injury, while, day by day, it was
renewed pain and grief to be treated by her with the gentlest and most
studied courtesy, but no longer as almost one of her own inner circle
of friends and confidants.

And as Sir Andrew Melville was in a few days more restored to her
service, he was far less often required to bear messages, or do little
services in the prison apartments, and he felt himself excluded, and
cut off from the intimacy that had been very sweet, and even a little
hopeful to him.

CHAPTER XLI.

HER ROYAL HIGHNESS.

Cicely had been living in almost as much suspense in London as her
mother at Fotheringhay. For greater security Mr. Talbot had kept her
on board the Mastiff till he had seen M. d'Aubepine Chateauneuf, and
presented to him Queen Mary's letter. The Ambassador, an exceedingly
polished and graceful Frenchman, was greatly astonished, and at first
incredulous; but he could not but accept the Queen's letter as genuine,
and he called into his counsels his Secretary De Salmonnet, an elderly
man, whose wife, a Scotswoman by birth, preferred her husband's society
to the delights of Paris. She was a Hamilton who had been a
pensionnaire in the convent at Soissons, and she knew that it had been
expected that an infant from Lochleven might be sent to the Abbess, but
that it had never come, and that after many months of waiting, tidings
had arrived that the ve