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The horses are spent," he said. "Shall we rest them here while the others come up? There are fresh relays at the lodge that should soon be brought."

Anne murmured an assent and jumped down, scarcely touching his hand. They were on high ground, in a little glade on top of a long, narrow ridge. A circle of trees half shut them in. From one side came the murmur of the unseen brook down which the stag had fled and the worrying whine of the searching dogs and on the other side, through the spaces in the trees, was a view of rolling woods and meadows, brown and gray, with here and there the purple patches of fresh plowed lands, and beyond them, where the Thames showed itself broad and blue from out under its trees, the diminished towers and spires of London were etched against the western sky.

Anne caught up the trail of her scarlet gown and began to walk back and forth restlessly in the glade. She was conscious fully-of her folly in having outridden the rest and thus furnished fresh fuel for gossip, but she told herself defiantly that she did not care, it was too late to be fastidious!

Henry, having tethered the two steaming animals, came and joined her in her restless walking. He took off his cap, running his fingers through his damp hair. It had vanished from the top of his head, but courtiers had positively assured that this baldness added to the nobility of his forehead. Although he had been drinking to a late hour the night before there were no signs of fatigue in his floridly fresh complexion: anyone meeting for the first time that ruddy, stalwart man, youthfully exuberant, would have taken him for five or ten years under his age. A powdering of dust lay on his suit of Lincoln green and he occupied himself a moment brushing it off, with shrewdly inquiring glances at his abstracted companion.

Clearly something out of the ordinary was passing behind that frowning forehead of hers!

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Where sits thy mood, Anne?" he asked at length, leaning forward to look in her face. "Thou hast said naught but yea or nay since the beginning of the hunt. Something has displeased thee."

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That something has," she returned bruskly.

Mayhap I can remedy the matter?" he suggested. She laughed, then gave him a darkling glance from her clouded eyes.

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"In coming to the hunt I met her Most Gracious Majesty, the queen. She said certain things to me which I liked not."

"What things?"

Anne's pride could not bring itself to repeat the insults. "I-I care not to name them," she cried, her bosom heaving.

Henry eyed her a moment in silence. He was not sorry to have her animosity roused against his wife, seeing there a chance for himself. He had no notion how strong already was that animosity. Yet his feeling for the girl resented stiffly any scorn put upon her. He turned the matter over in his mind.

"She is jealous," he told her, with a laugh," and with good cause, I well ween."

"Not with any cause of mine!" she disputed, and her anger and disgust broke into mutinous revolt. "I vow I shall leave this court where I have too much to endure. I beg to take leave of your Grace to-morrow." The threat shot Henry with alarm. She was absolutely capable of carrying it out if she were sufficiently roused, and it would appear that she was. The look that his small gray eyes turned upon her was one of strangely humble beseechment. She reminded him in

that moment of nothing so much as some elusive bird of passage, a gay-plumed wanderer alighted by hazard and half ready to take wing again. The contentment that was generally upon him in her presence vanished before the reminder of this insecurity. He felt how insupportable his court would be without her bright presence. He felt how intolerable his life would be without the promise of her love. He felt a surge of savage resentment against the conditions of his life. He, a king, accounted the most powerful man in England, and he had less freedom, less joy, than some of the meanest of his subjects! Weighted with responsibility-in his welling indignation he forgot Wolsey's vast assumption of that same responsibility — loaded with cares, tied to a dull, sick, ageing woman, denied a son and heir, and in love, desperately, deeply, in love with a slip of a girl whom he was powerless to make his own! Deceive himself as he might by drinking bouts and revels, truly his life was not a happy one!

"Wherein have I offended?" he said to Anne, turning this over bitterly.

Anne made no reply. She tossed back the fluttering hair from her face with a characteristic gesture that seemed to be tossing him and his court away also from her thoughts.

"Am I then nothing to thee?" he said a little huskily. He was a very different man this day from the conqueror who had tried to clasp Anne in rough wooing at that first interview at the cardinal's.

His voice touched Anne, swift as her nature was to respond to any genuine affection for herself. At any rate he loved her, he very truly loved her. She exonerated him from his share of the situation in which she found herself he had but done what any man, any