We found Jane crouching on the floor in a corner half dead with fright from the noise and tumult—­and where do you think we found her mistress?  Frightened?  Not at all; she was lying in bed with her face to the wall as cool as a January morning; her clothing in a little heap in the middle of the room.

Without turning her head, she exclaimed:  “Come in, brother; you are quite welcome.  Bring in your friends; I am ready to receive them, though not in court attire, as you see.”  And she thrust her bare arm straight up from the bed to prove her words.  You should have seen the Frenchman’s little black eyes gloat on its beauty.

Mary went on, still looking toward the wall:  “I will arise and receive you all informally, if you will but wait.”

This disconcerted the imperturbable Henry, who was about at his wit’s end.

“Cover that arm, you hussy,” he cried in a flaming rage.

“Be not impatient, brother mine!  I will jump out in just a moment.”

A little scream from Jane startled everybody, and she quickly ran up to the king, saying:  “I beg your majesty to go.  She will do as she says so sure as you remain; you don’t know her; she is very angry.  Please go; I will bring her down stairs somehow.”

“Ah, indeed!  Jane Bolingbroke,” came from the bed.  “I will receive my guests myself when they are kind enough to come to my room.”  The cover-lid began to move, and, whether or not she was really going to carry out her threat, I cannot say, but Henry, knowing her too well to risk it, hurried us all out of the room and marched down stairs at the head of his defeated cohorts.  He was swearing in a way to make a priest’s flesh creep, and protesting by everything holy that Mary should be the wife of Louis or die.  He went back to Mary’s room at intervals, but there was enough persistence in that one girl to stop the wheels of time, if she but set herself to do it, and the king came away from each visit the victim of another rout.

Finally his anger cooled and he became amused.  From the last visit he came down laughing: 

[Illustration]

“I shall have to give up the fight or else put my armor on with visor down,” said he; “it is not safe to go near her without it; she is a very vixen, and but now tried to scratch my eyes out.”

Wolsey, who had a wonderful knack for finding the easiest means to a difficult end, took Henry off to a window where they held a whispered conversation.

It was pathetic to see a mighty king and his great minister of state consulting and planning against one poor girl; and, as angry as I felt toward Mary, I could not help pitying her, and admired, beyond the power of pen to write, the valiant and so far impregnable defense she had put up against an array of strength that would have made a king tremble on his throne.

Presently Henry gave one of his loud laughs, and slapped his thigh as if highly satisfied with some proposition of Wolsey’s.