Weary and cramped she was to the point of having a feverish attack, and on one slightly delirious night she fretted piteously after “mother,” and shook off the Queen’s hand, entreating that “mother, real mother,” would come.  Mary was much pained, and declared that if the child were not better the next day she should have a messenger sent to summon Mrs. Talbot.  However, she was better in the morning; and the Queen, who had been making strong representations of the unhealthiness and other inconveniences of Tutbury, received a promise that she should change her abode as soon as Chartley, a house belonging to the young Earl of Essex, could be prepared for her.

The giving away large alms had always been one of her great solaces—­ not that she was often permitted any personal contact with the poor:  only to sit at a window watching them as they flocked into the court, to be relieved by her servants under supervision from some officer of her warders, so as to hinder any surreptitious communication from passing between them.  Sometimes, however, the poor would accost her or her suite as she rode out; and she had a great compassion for them, deprived, as she said, of the alms of the religious houses, and flogged or branded if hunger forced them into beggary.  On a fine spring day Sir Ralf Sadler invited the ladies out to a hawking party on the banks of the Dove, with the little sparrow hawks, whose prey was specially larks.  Pity for the beautiful soaring songster, or for the young ones that might be starved in their nests, if the parent birds were killed, had not then been thought of.  A gallop on the moors, though they were strangely dull, gray, and stony, was always the best remedy for the Queen’s ailments; and the party got into the saddle gaily, and joyously followed the chase, thinking only of the dexterity and beauty of the flight of pursuer and pursued, instead of the deadly terror and cruel death to which they condemned the created creature, the very proverb for joyousness.

It was during the halt which followed the slaughter of one of the larks, and the reclaiming of the hawk, that Cicely strayed a little away from the rest of the party to gather some golden willow catkins and sprays of white sloe thorn wherewith to adorn a beaupot that might cheer the dull rooms at Tutbury.

She had jumped down from her pony for the purpose, and was culling the branch, when from the copsewood that clothed the gorge of the river a ragged woman, with a hood tied over her head, came forward with outstretched hand asking for alms.

“Yon may have something from the Queen anon, Goody, when I can get back to her,” said Cis, not much liking the looks or the voice of the woman.

“And have you nothing to cross the poor woman’s hand with, fair mistress?” returned the beggar.  “She brought you fair fortune once; how know you but she can bring you more?”

And Cicely recognised the person who had haunted her at Sheffield, Tideswell, and Buxton, and whom she had heard pronounced to be no woman at all.