“My God, madam,” said I, “why did you give that list?” She laughed again, and her eyes flashed with the very light of mischief.

“I grant ’twas a fib,” said she; “but I was taken unawares, and, la, how could I recite to her the true list of my rare finery which came to port yesterday?  So I but gave the list of goods for which my Lady Culpeper sent to England for the replenishing of her wardrobe and her daughter’s, and which is daily expected by ship.  I had it from Cicely Hyde, who had it from Cate Culpeper.  The ship is due now, and may be even now in port, and so I worded what I said, that ’twas not, after all, a fib, except the hearer chose to make it so.  I said, ‘Such goods as these are due, madam.’” Then she gave the list anew, like a parrot, while Catherine, who had returned, stood staring at her, white with terror, though Mary did not see her until she had finished.  Then, when she turned and caught her keenly anxious eyes, she started.  “You here, Catherine?” said she.  Then, knowing not how much her sister knew already, she tried to cover her confusion, like a child denying its raid on the jam pots, while its lips and fingers are still sticky with the stolen sweet.  “What think you of my list, sweetheart?” cried she, merrily.  “A pair of the silk stockings and two of the breast-knots and a mask and a flowered apron shall you have.”  Then out of the room she whisked abruptly, laughing from excess of nervous confusion, and not being able to keep up the farce longer.

Then Catherine turned to me.  “She has undone herself, for Madam Cavendish will see those goods when the Golden Horn comes in, or ferret the mystery to its farthest hole of hiding,” said she.  Then she wrung her hands and cried out sharply, “My God, Harry Wingfield, what is to be done?”

“Madam Cavendish would surely never betray her own flesh and blood,” said I, though doubtfully, when I reflected upon her hardness to Catherine herself, for Madam Judith Cavendish was not one for whom love could change the colour of the clear light of justice, and she would see forever her own as they were.

“There is to her no such word as betray except in the service of the king,” said Catherine.  Then she added in a whisper, “Know you the story of her youngest son, my uncle Ralph Cavendish, who went over to Cromwell?”

I nodded.  I knew it well, and had heard it from a lad how Ralph Cavendish’s own mother had turned him from her door one night with the king’s troops in the neighbourhood, though it was afterward argued that she did not know of that, and he had been taken before morning and afterwards executed, and she had never said a word nor shed a tear that any one saw.

“When the Golden Horn comes in she will demand to see the goods,” Catherine repeated.

“Then—­the Golden Horn must not come in,” said I.

Catherine looked at me with that flash of ready wit in her eyes which was like to the flash of fire from gunpowder meeting tinder.  Then she cried out, “Quick, then, quick, I pray thee, Harry Wingfield, to the wharf!  For if ever I saw sail, I saw that, and the tide will have turned ’m.  Quick, quick!”