She took a step nearer, his manner inflaming her distrust. Her haggard eyes searched his half-averted face as if to drag truth from it. "When saw you my brother?"

"I saw him last at York Place," was all Kingston would say. An aversion to further scenes perhaps a wasteful emotion of pity for the queen made him shirk the task of enlightening her further.

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'Oh, I hear say that I shall be accused with three men," she flared out, "and I can say no more than nay! Oh, Norris, they said that thou hadst accused me! Thou art here in the Tower — thou and I may die together . . . and Mark, thou, too, art here . . . Oh, my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow!" She checked her outburst and turned sharply upon Kingston again. “Mr. Kingston, shall I die without justice?

"The poorest subject the king hath has that," he replied, and shut the door behind him on the bitter incredulity of her flouting laughter.

CHAPTER XXX

THE TOWER

'HE disaster which had swept over her, as sudden and blasting as a stroke of lightning, seemed almost too great for her shocked brain to conceive. One day a queen, reigning in the midst of her court, and the next a prisoner in the Tower, her life conspired against! Her senses reeled under the staggering horror. She was in a chaos of burning anger, of fear, of terror and of dazed bewilderment.

And the attendants who closed in about her had been assigned, not from her friends but from her enemies, and the two that had been long the most maliciously disposed to her, her aunt, the wife of Sir Edward Boleyn, and Mrs. Coseyns, wife of the master of her horse, carried espionage of her through every hour of the day and night, sleeping on a pallet on the foot of her bed so that she was forever denied the comfort of privacy and the poor solace of breaking down. And all day long there were five pairs of eyes upon her in a smug satisfaction that marked, God knows what, of petty feminine revenge, and five tongues artfully endeavoring to entangle her into damaging admissions.

They pushed insult as far as they dared, parading their disbelief of her innocence with sly headshakes, upraised brows, incredulous smiles and pertinent innuendoes. And Anne, caged and baited, pacing up and down between them in her distracted agony, answered

them now with proud silence, now with frantic outpourings of angry denial.

"Lies, lies!" she said fiercely as the aunt - a sisterin-law of Anne's father, a hawk-nosed, mean-mouthed woman, for whom Anne had ever shown a disdainful disregard, repeated an accusation.

Lady Boleyn pursed up her lips and Mrs. Coseyns smiled unbearably. "So they are all lies," she murmured. For ten years she had fawned upon Anne, hating her poisonously for her outspoken frankness and reckless pride and now for once she was expanding in the relief of hinting at her true colors. "Why then on Saturday did Norris tell thy almoner thou wast a good woman?"

"Why should he not tell my almoner so?" Anne demanded passionately. "Thou knowest that my enemies for years have tried to fill the court with evil slanders. It is the part of my friends to deny them. . . . I bade Norris do so, as one who stood close to our person."

"Very close," came significantly from Lady Boleyn. Anne checked the wild impulse to retort. She remem

bered that these women were no more malicious than the others of the court and she read sincerity in the suspicion of their eyes and the little tossings of their heads. Her whole body burned as she realized their eager belief of these monstrous things.

"He knew the truth," she said as calmly as she could. "He came oft to our rooms for he is to marry my pretty cousin, Madge Shelton."

"Methinks he hath been a long time marrying this pretty cousin," Mrs. Coseyns insinuated. "His wife was long dead.. . Was it not known to your Grace that he was said to come for another's sake?"

"Oh, you have been listening to some jest of Weston's

- you know he was ever a gay talker," Anne cried impa

tiently. "It was common flattery for him to say that the suitors of my maids wooed them to be in my presence -'tis the incense offered a queen. Why, you would not take a light jest so hard-it would do great harm to the innocent gentleman." A deep concern throbbed in Anne's voice as she thought of Norris, gay, debonair Norris, whose friendship had never wavered through all her wavering, uncertain years, now in this very Tower, in fear of death, for her. Oh, it was pitiful! "And as for Smeton," she went on, her voice supplicating in its earnestness to reach these hard old women and win them to belief, "why I have never given him so much as a kind word. He sayeth the same, surely. . . . 'Twas not three days ago he was peevish at some command of mine and I told him he must not look to have me treat him as if he were gentle born. 'I know,' quoth he, a look sufficeth me.' You know the boy had a proud stomach! ... To arrest him! I could laugh if my heart were not so heavy. king does it but to try me."

But perhaps the

So Anne's tongue ran, as her thoughts darted hither and yon like lost swallows over the unknown fields of dread, now defending herself in eager argument and explanation to these women to whom three days before she would have scorned to condescend, now railing in passionate resentment and despairing surmise. It was for her brother she feared the most.

"They will not dare not to cage him," she miserably foreboded, and it was with no cry of surprise that she learned at last that Rochford was in the Tower and had been there since noon of the day that she had been brought there. She could not discover that anything was charged against him except complicity with her supposed misdeeds.

Presently she was informed that Brereton, Wyatt, Weston and Page had been added to the prisoners.

"So many?" she said with a melancholy smile. "Must so many be destroyed?"

In these arrests was revealed the scope of the action against her; the inclusive sweep of that scythe which was mowing her down. None of her faction who would have hindered or avenged her death were to be left. Her brother and all his intimates were entangled; some extra charges had evidently been trumped up to include them all. Wyatt, she feared, would be made that third alleged lover at whom the council had hinted. From her experience she was sure that threats and menaces were being used to intimidate those friends still at large. Of her father's fate she remained in ignorance. Once she thought she heard his voice in the halls; Kingston denied it but that was not conclusive.

The commissioners did not visit her further. Kingston shirked talking to her, leaving her to his wife who bustled about the royal apartments in complacent importance. Anne had absolutely no word of what was being prepared against her, nor of what she might expect from one hour to another; her greatest terror was of some mockery of a trial behind the barred doors from which no syllable of her defense would penetrate to the world without. She lived in that terror from one hideous minute to another, starting at every opening of the door. She did not unlock her lips on her anguish now; she began to perceive that these women had been put there about her to report and twist her every word into some damaging admission, to create evidence that they were only too ready to manufacture from her least reference. She tried to hide her grief from their hateful eyes with a desperate effort at composure but as