the lady. "Now tell
me freely, what wouldst liefer do?"

"Aught that were clean and fair and honest!" [pretty] said Maude
confidentially, her eyes kindling again. "An' they lack any 'prentices
in that City, I would fain be bound yonder. Verily, I would love to
twine flowers, or to weave dovecotes [the golden nets which confined
ladies' hair], or to guard brave gowns with lace, and the like of that,
an' I could be learned. Save that, methinks, over there, I would be
ever and alway a-gazing from the lattice."

"Wherefore?"

"And yet I wis not," added Maude, thinking aloud. "Where the streets be
gold, and the gates margarites, what shall the gowns be?"

"Pure, bright stones [see Note 3], little maid," said the lady. "But
there be no 'prentices yonder."

"What! be they all masters?" said the child.

"`A kingdom and priests,'" she said. "But there be no 'prentices,
seeing there is no work, save the King's work."

Little Maude wondered privately whether that were to sew stars upon
sunbeams.

"But there shall not enter any defouled thing into that City," pursued
the lady seriously; "no leasing, neither no manner of wrongfulness."

Little Maude's face fell considerably.

"Then I could not go to cleanse the pans yonder!" she said sorrowfully.
"I did tell a lie once to Mistress Drew."

"Who is Mistress Drew?" enquired the lady.

The child looked up in astonishment, wondering how it came to pass that
any one living in Langley Palace should not know her who, to Maude's
apprehension, was monarch of all she surveyed--inside the kitchen.

"She is Mistress Ursula Drew, that is over me and Parnel."

"Doth she cleanse pans?" said the lady smilingly.

"Nay, verily! She biddeth us."

"I see--she is queen of the kitchen. And is there none over her?"

"Ay, Master Warine."

"And who is over Master Warine?"

A question beyond little Maude's power to answer.

"The King must be, of force," said she meditatively. "But who is else--
saving his gracious mastership and our Lady her mistresshood--in good
sooth I wis not."

The lady looked at her for a minute with a smile on her lips. Then, a
little to Maude's surprise, she clapped her hands. A handsomely attired
woman--to the child's eyes, the counterpart of the lady who had been
talking with her--appeared in the doorway.

"Senora!" she said, with a reverence.

The two ladies thereupon began a conversation, in a language totally
incomprehensible to little Ma