Brandon, I believe, saw nothing of Mary’s growing partiality at all.  He could not help but find her wonderfully attractive and interesting, and perhaps it needed only the thought that she might love him, to kindle a flame in his own breast.  But at the time of our ride to Windsor, Charles Brandon was not in love with Mary Tudor, however near it he may unconsciously have been.  He would whistle and sing, and was as light-hearted as a lark—­I mean when away from the princess as well as with her—­a mood that does not go with a heart full of heavy love, of impossible, fatal love, such as his would have been for the first princess of the first blood royal of the world.

But another’s trouble could not dim the sunlight in my own heart, and that ride to Windsor was the happiest day of my life up to that time.  Even Jane threw off the little cloud our forebodings had gathered, and chatted and laughed like the creature of joy and gladness she was.  Now and then her heart would well up so full of the sunlight and the flowers, and the birds in the hedge, aye, and of the contagious love in my heart, too, that it poured itself forth in a spontaneous little song which thrills me even now.

Ahead of us were the princess and Brandon.  Every now and then her voice came back to us in a stave of a song, and her laughter, rich and low, wafted on the wings of the soft south wind, made the glad birds hush to catch its silvery note.  It seemed that the wild flowers had taken on their brightest hue, the trees their richest Sabbath-day green, and the sun his softest radiance, only to gladden the heart of Mary that they might hear her laugh.  The laugh would have come quite as joyously had the flowers been dead and the sun black, for flowers and sunlight, south wind, green pastures and verdant hills, all were riding by her side.  Poor Mary!  Her days of laughter were numbered.

We all rode merrily on to Windsor, and when we arrived it was curious to see the great nobles, Buckingham, both the Howards, Seymour and a dozen others stand back for plain Charles Brandon to dismount the fairest maiden and the most renowned princess in Christendom.  It was done most gracefully.  She was but a trifle to his strong arms, and he lifted her to the sod as gently as if she were a child.  The nobles envied Brandon his evident favor with this unattainable Mary and hated him accordingly, but they kept their thoughts to themselves for two reasons:  First, they knew not to what degree the king’s favor, already marked, with the help of the princess might carry him; and second, they did not care to have a misunderstanding with the man who had cut out Adam Judson’s eyes.

We remained at Windsor four or five days, during which time the king made several knights.  Brandon would probably have been one of them, as everybody expected, had not Buckingham related to Henry the episode of the loose girth, and adroitly poisoned his mind as to Mary’s partiality.  At this the king began to cast a jealous eye on Brandon.  His sister was his chief diplomatic resource, and when she loved or married, it should be for Henry’s benefit, regardless of all else.