all plain."

"Who is he? You know I cannot abide those foul carrion rascals you
make use of," said Elizabeth, with an air of disgust.

"This man is gentleman born. Villain he may be, but there is naught to
offend your Majesty in him. He is one Langston, a kinsman of this
Talbot's; and having once been a Papist, but now having seen the error
of his ways, he did good service in the unwinding of the late horrible
plot."

"Well, if no other way will serve you but I must hear the fellow, have
him in."

A neatly-dressed, small, elderly man, entirely arrayed in black, was
called in, and knelt most humbly before the Queen. Being bidden to
tell what he knew respecting the lady who had appeared before the Queen
the day before, calling herself Bride Hepburn, he returned for answer
that he believed it to be verily her name, but that she was the
daughter of a man who had fled to France, and become an archer of the
Scottish guard.

He told how he had been at Hull when the infant had been saved from the
wreck, and brought home to Mistress Susan Talbot, who left the place
the next day, and had, he understood, bred up the child as her own. He
himself, being then, as he confessed, led astray by the delusions of
Popery, had much commerce with the Queen's party, and had learnt from
some of the garrison of Dunfermline that the child on board the lost
ship was the offspring of this same Hepburn, and of one of Queen Mary's
many namesake kindred, who had died in childbirth at Lochleven. And
now Langston professed bitterly to regret what he had done when, in his
disguise at Buxton, he had made known to some of Mary's suite that the
supposed Cicely Talbot was of their country and kindred. She had been
immediately made a great favourite by the Queen of Scots, and the
attendants all knew who she really was, though she still went by the
name of Talbot. He imagined that the Queen of Scots, whose charms were
not so imperishable as those which dazzled his eyes at this moment,
wanted a fresh bait for her victims, since she herself was growing old,
and thus had actually succeeded in binding Babington to her service,
though even then the girl was puffed up with notions of her own
importance and had flouted him. And now, all other hope having
vanished, Queen Mary's last and ablest resource had been to possess the
poor maiden with an idea of being actually her own child, and then to
work on her filial obedience to offer herself as a hostage,