On the whole, she was pleased.  Tete-a-tetes with Humfrey were dreadfully embarrassing, and she felt life so flat without her nocturnal romance that she was very glad to have some one who would care to talk to her of the Queen.  In point of fact, such conversation was prohibited.  In the former days, when there had been much more intercourse between the Earl’s household and the neighbourhood, regular cautions had been given to every member of it not to discuss the prisoner or make any communication about her habits.  The younger generation who had grown up in the time of the closer captivity had never been instructed in these laws, for the simple reason that they hardly saw any one.  Antony and Cicely were likewise most comfortably isolated, for she was flanked by a young esquire, who had no eyes nor ears save for the fair widow of sixteen whom he had just led in, and Antony, by a fat and deaf lady, whose only interest was in tasting as many varieties of good cheer as she could, and trying to discover how and of what they were compounded.  Knowing Mistress Cicely to be a member of the family, she once or twice referred the question to her across Antony, but getting very little satisfaction, she gave up the young lady as a bad specimen of housewifery, and was forced to be content with her own inductions.

There was plenty of time for Antony to begin with, “Are there as many conies as ever in the chase?” and to begin on a discussion of all the memories connected with the free days of childhood, the blackberry and bilberry gatherings, the hide-and-seek in the rocks and heather, the consternation when little Dick was lost, the audacious comedy with the unsuspected spectators, and all the hundred and one recollections, less memorable perhaps, but no less delightful to both.  It was only thus gradually that they approached their recent encounter in the Castleton Cavern, and Antony explained how he had burnt to see his dear Queen and mistress once again, and that his friends, Tichborne and the rest, were ready to kiss every footstep she had taken, and almost worshipped him and John Eyre for contriving this mode of letting them behold the hitherto unknown object of their veneration.

All that passionate, chivalrous devotion, which in Sidney, Spenser, and many more attached itself to then-great Gloriana, had in these young men, all either secretly or openly reconciled to Rome, found its object in that rival in whom Edmund Spenser only beheld his false Duessa or snowy Florimel.  And, indeed, romance had in her a congenial heroine, who needed little self-blinding so to appear.  Her beauty needed no illusion to be credited.  Even at her age, now over forty, the glimpse they had had in the fitful torchlight of the cavern had been ravishing, and had confirmed all they had ever heard of her witching loveliness; nor did they recollect how that very obscurity might have assisted it.