There is a limit to the best of feminine nerve, and at that limit should always be found a flood of healthful tears.  Mary had reached it when she threw the necklace and shot her bolt at Wolsey, so she broke down and hastily left the room.

The king, of course, was beside himself with rage.

“By God’s soul,” he swore, “she shall marry Louis of France, or I will have her whipped to death on the Smithfield pillory.”  And in his wicked heart—­so impervious to a single lasting good impulse—­he really meant it.

Immediately after this, the king, de Longueville and Wolsey set out for London.

I remained behind hoping to see the girls, and after a short time a page plucked me by the sleeve, saying the princess wished to see me.

The page conducted me to the same room in which had been fought the battle with Mary in bed.  The door had been placed on its hinges again, but the bed was tumbled as Mary had left it, and the room was in great disorder.

“Oh, Sir Edwin,” began Mary, who was weeping, “was ever woman in such frightful trouble?  My brother is killing me.  Can he not see that I could not live through a week of this marriage?  And I have been deserted by all my friends, too, excepting Jane.  She, poor thing, cannot leave.”

“You know I would not go,” said Jane, parenthetically.  Mary continued:  “You, too, have been home an entire week and have not been near me.”

I began to soften at the sight of her grief, and concluded, with Brandon, that, after all, her beauty could well cover a multitude of sins; perhaps even this, her great transgression against him.

The princess was trying to check her weeping, and in a moment took up the thread of her unfinished sentence:  “And Master Brandon, too, left without so much as sending me one little word—­not a line nor a syllable.  He did not come near me, but went off as if I did not care—­or he did not.  Of course he did not care, or he would not have behaved so, knowing I was in so much trouble.  I did not see him at all after—­one afternoon in the king’s—­about a week before that awful night in London, except that night, when I was so frightened I could not speak one word of all the things I wished to say.”

This sounded strange enough, and I began more than ever to suspect something wrong.  I, however, kept as firm a grasp as possible upon the stock of indignation I had brought with me.

“How did you expect to see or hear from him,” asked I, “when he was lying in a loathsome dungeon without one ray of light, condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered, because of your selfish neglect to save him who, at the cost of half his blood, and almost his life, had saved so much for you?”

Her eyes grew big, and the tears were checked by genuine surprise.

I continued:  “Lady Mary, no one could have made me believe that you would stand back and let the man, to whom you owed so great a debt, lie so long in such misery, and be condemned to such a death for the act that saved you.  I could never have believed it!”