Humfrey had to submit to exchange good-nights with Cicely, and she made her way less willingly than usual to the apartments of the Queen, who was being made ready for her bed.  “Here comes our truant,” she exclaimed as the maiden entered.  “I sent to rescue thee from the western seafarer who had clawed thee in his tarry clutch.  Thou didst act the sister’s part passing well.  I hear my Lord and all his meine have been sitting, open-mouthed, hearkening to his tales of savages and cannibals.”

“O madam, he told us of such lovely isles,” said Cis.  “The sea, he said, is blue, bluer than we can conceive, with white waves of dazzling surf, breaking on islands fringed with white shells and coral, and with palms, their tops like the biggest ferns in the brake, and laden with red golden fruit as big as goose eggs.  And the birds!  O madam, my mother, the birds!  They are small, small as our butterflies and beetles, and they hang hovering and quivering over a flower so that Humfrey thought they were moths, for he saw nothing but a whizzing and a whirring till he smote the pretty thing dead, and then he said that I should have wept for pity, for it was a little bird with a long bill, and a breast that shines red in one light, purple in another, and flame-coloured in a third.  He has brought home the little skin and feathers of it for me.”

“Thou hast supped full of travellers’ tales, my simple child.”

“Yea, madam, but my Lord listened, and made Humfrey sit beside him, and made much of him—­my Lord himself!  I would fain bring him to you, madam.  It is so wondrous to hear him tell of the Red Men with crowns of feathers and belts of beads.  Such gentle savages they be, and their chiefs as courteous and stately as any of our princes, and yet those cruel Spaniards make them slaves and force them to dig in mines, so that they die and perish under their hands.”

“And better so than that they should not come to the knowledge of the faith,” said Mary.

“I forgot that your Grace loves the Spaniards,” said Cis, much in the tone in which she might have spoken of a taste in her Grace for spiders, adders, or any other noxious animal.

“One day my child will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother’s staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days.  Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly little brain.  Ah, that thou couldst once meet a true prince!”

“The well,” murmured Cicely.

“Tush, child,” said the Queen, amused.  “What of that?  Thy name is not Cis, is it?  ’Tis only the slough that serves thee for the nonce.  The good youth will find himself linked to some homely, housewifely Cis in due time, when the Princess Bride is queening it in France or Austria, and will own that the well was wiser than he.”