“You are my cousin now, messire,” the Queen told him, and innocently offered to his lips her own.

He never moved; but their glances crossed, and for that instant she saw the face of a man who has just stepped into a quicksand.  She grew red, without knowing why.  Then he spoke, composedly, of trivial matters.

Thus began the Queen’s acquaintance with Edward Maudelain.  She was by this time the loneliest woman in the island.  Her husband granted her a bright and fresh perfection of form and color, but desiderated any appetizing tang, and lamented, in his phrase, a certain kinship to the impeccable loveliness of some female saint in a jaunty tapestry; bright as ice in sunshine, just so her beauty chilled you, he complained:  moreover, this daughter of the Caesars had been fetched into England, chiefly, to breed him children, and this she had never done.  Undoubtedly he had made a bad bargain,—­he was too easy-going, people presumed upon it.  His barons snatched their cue and esteemed Dame Anne to be negligible; whereas the clergy, finding that she obstinately read the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, under the irrelevant plea of not comprehending Latin, began to denounce her from their pulpits as a heretic and as the evil woman prophesied by Ezekiel.

It was the nature of this desolate child to crave affection, as a necessary, and pitifully she tried to purchase it through almsgiving.  In the attempt she could have found no coadjutor more ready than Edward Maudelain.  Giving was with these two a sort of obsession, though always he gave in a half scorn of his fellow creatures which was not more than half concealed.  This bastard was charitable and pious because he knew his soul, conceived in double sin, to be doubly evil, and therefore doubly in need of redemption through good works.

Now in and about the Queen’s lonely rooms the woman and the priest met daily to discuss now this or that point of theology, or now (to cite a single instance) Gammer Tudway’s obstinate sciatica.  Considerate persons found something of the pathetic in their preoccupation by these matters while, so clamantly, the dissension between the young King and his uncles gathered to a head.  The King’s uncles meant to continue governing England, with the King as their ward, as long as they could; he meant to relieve himself of this guardianship, and them of their heads, as soon as he was able.  War seemed inevitable, the air was thick with portents; and was this, then, an appropriate time, the judicious demanded of high Heaven, for the Queen of imperilled England to concern herself about a peasant’s toothache?

Long afterward was Edward Maudelain to remember this quiet and amiable period of his life, and to wonder over the man that he had been through this queer while.  Embittered and suspicious she had found him, noted for the carping tongue he lacked both power and inclination to bridle; and she had, against his nature, made Maudelain see that every person is at bottom lovable, and that human vices are but the stains of a traveller midway in a dusty journey; and had incited the priest no longer to do good for his soul’s health, but simply for his fellow’s benefit.