cheek. How dared the queen look so! All the world went hunting in the king's train-there was no harm in it. The anger that unfortunately was always in Catherine's power to excite rose in her.

Catherine spoke to the woman beside her, without turning her head.

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How red she grows, Maria! .. Doth she not blush like a maid?"

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There were four waiting women with the their quick titter emphasized the equivocation.

"Your Majesty!" slipped from Anne, her eyes ablaze. "Why should you not blush like a maid?" went on the queen's voice, a spice of bitter amusement lightening its heavy rancor. "You are overquick at conclusions, Mistress Boleyn - you will o'erreach yourself some fair day."

She stopped, and stared again at the baited girl before her, a slow, hard, measuring stare.

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You are wondrously apparelled," she commented, too fine for the society of the simple gentlewomen about who have paid no such price for their clothes. 'Twas a clever device, those new-tangled pointed sleeves, to hide that extra finger of thine!"

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The laugh that Catherine waited for came unstintedly. Anne stretched out her left hand in full sight of them all.

“'Tis a double nail, your Majesty," she corrected in dangerous calm.

"Only a nail? But that is enough! Faugh! Put thy hand down - I could never bear to look upon blemishes." From red Anne turned to chalky white. "Oh, how dare you, how dare you!" sang through her veins. "I could make you pay for this-I shall make you pay! If you knew -'

Catherine, looking on her, saw nothing but a little

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intrigeant for her husband's favor: she had no vision of the girl soul, intolerably humiliated, intolerably goaded, quivering on the brink of a fiery revenge. She had no notion of tremendous crisis in their lives. With the savage gusto of her outraged arrogance she flung her gibes. ""Tis said, your Majesty," tittered Donna Maria, her loyalty reveling in Anne's helpless fury, "that Mistress Anne must needs be clever at devising strange fashionsshe hath so much about her person to conceal!"

"There is that wart, that swelling, on her neck that she must hide with her velvet ribbon," sniggered another. "A pity she could not wear a veil altogether," laughed an emboldened third.

Anne said never a word. For once she was dumb, and Catherine fed her satisfaction with the sight of her white pallor. Then the queen made a gesture of dismissal.

"Take thy deformities to thy ride, mistress," she commanded, and Anne slipped back into the doorway with a low bow to let the royal party pass by.

Then with a bursting heart she swept forth to her hunt.

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CHAPTER IX

A VISION OF A CROWN

HE rode a white horse of Henry's gift, a spirited, beautiful creature, with whose dashing impetuosity and chafing impatience at control she was much in sympathy. To-day she gave Diana the rein and with Henry's big black at her side they shot ahead of the field of riders and raced dizzily along the way that wound from St. James' Park into Epping forest.

The speed, the motion, the whistling of the wind past her ears, was all at first that Anne was conscious of. The hard riding answered her need for violent action and the buffeting wind seemed to do her struggling and screaming for her. With her head bent forward, one hand clinging to the reins, the other holding on her flapping hat, she dashed on, tossing only a curt word to the gay questions of the king. Every spark of spirit in her was flaming in revolt at the ignominious baiting to which she had been subjected. She felt outraged, degraded; her face flamed.

All afternoon she rode furiously, obliviously following the dogs that were trailing a fine stag. It was March; the bare boughs were swelling with tender buds, the ground was soft and spongy from spring rains and the little brooks ran black and swollen in their courses. The seasons seldom made their appeal in vain to Anne; she rarely saw the out-of-doors without a lifting of her spirit to its wide horizons, but to-day, though the fiercest of

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her trembling anger outwore itself in her heart, she felt no balm for the wound within her. The dark eyes that were set so rigidly on the path ahead of her were in reality following the path of her life, searching its conclusions, facing its despairs. The net, that her soberest moments had seen folding about her, had closed in; she was caught, branded in the eyes of the world if not yet in her own conscience. Who of that jesting throng behind them believed in her? Who of those who called themselves her friends? Who of her family? At the best, they but thought she was playing a game, deferring her surrender, raising, perhaps, her price. Under all the sweets that she had tasted in their eager deference to her, their flattery, their vying for favor, she came now upon the venom of this thought of theirs of her, this utter disbelief in her own innocence.

Oh, fool, fool that she had been, to think that she could play with fire, could control such a situation! She remembered with a sorry smile her first naïve hope that she could bend Henry to consent to her marriage with Percy. She had not profited by that lesson—she had gone on in her absurd self-confidence, thinking she could take as she liked and reject as she liked — but the court was no place for halfway measures.

But what else could she have done, she angrily demanded of this accusing self? If she had angered Henry she would have been bundled off again into the country to yawn her head off among the kitchen maids, and there would have been no second chance for her then. She would have grown older and duller and duller and older with each succeeding year, becoming wisely proficient in making jellies and flavoring sweets for such gray-beards as her father would semi-annually bring to the place. Perhaps a fat country squire would wish to marry her.

Any girl, so she vindicated herself, would have done as she had done.

And what, after all, was it that she had done? Nothing in the world to be ashamed of! There had been nothing that the whole court might not see, indeed nothing that the whole court had not seen. She was not to blame because the court had gone on and constructed tales of what it thought it had not seen. She had been pleasant to Henry, nothing more; danced, talked, bantered, accepted a gift or two, refused steadfastly any hope of her bestowing anything in return. He at least, she thought bitterly, knew how little she had granted! She had made him respect her!

But what should she do? How was she to go on? Leave court? . . . In disgrace, would be on everyone's tongue. No one would believe it was of her own volition. No one would believe her such a fool as to throw away her favor for such a bubble as self-esteem. And it would be too late to save her reputation then. She felt, in helpless shame, how bespattered that was now. Her sister's scandal had urged on her own. . . . Stay on at court? . . . She could not continue like this forever. Henry was impatient: she had exhausted her wit and her spirit in keeping him at his distance. If she denied him longer he would turn against her. . . . O dear God, what a labyrinth it all was! What should she do?

She was aroused from her absorption by the abrupt ending of the hunt: the stag had escaped along a brook and the baffled dogs were puzzling up and down the sides of it. She and the king had outridden all the rest and the calls of the others' horns came to them from a distance.

Henry wound his own horn, then sprang down from the sweating black that staggered under him.