This house, built of stone, timber, and brick, with two large courts, two gardens, and three yards, covered nearly as much space as the castle itself.  A pleasant, smooth, grass lawn lay in front, and on it converged the avenues of oaks and walnuts, stretching towards the gates of the park, narrowing to the eye into single lines, then going absolutely out of sight, and the sea of foliage presenting the utmost variety of beautiful tints of orange, yellow, brown, and red.  There was a great gateway between two new octagon towers of red brick, with battlements and dressings of stone, and from this porch a staircase led upwards to the great stone-paved hall, with a huge fire burning on the open hearth.  Around it had gathered the ladies of the Talbot family waiting for the reception.  The warder on the tower had blown his horn as a signal that the master and his royal guest were within the park, and the banner of the Talbots had been raised to announce their coming, but nearly half an hour must pass while the party came along the avenue from the drawbridge over the Sheaf ere they could arrive at the lodge.

So the ladies, in full state dresses, hovered over the fire, while the children played in the window seat near at hand.

Gilbert Talbot’s wife, a thin, yellow-haired, young creature, promising to be like her mother, the Countess, had a tongue which loved to run, and with the precocity and importance of wifehood at sixteen, she dilated to her companions on her mother’s constant attendance on the Queen, and the perpetual plots for that lady’s escape.  “She is as shifty and active as any cat-a-mount; and at Chatsworth she had a scheme for being off out of her bedchamber window to meet a traitor fellow named Boll; but my husband smelt it out in good time, and had the guard beneath my lady’s window, and the fellows are in gyves, and to see the lady the day it was found out!  Not a wry face did she make.  Oh no!  ’Twas all my good lord, and my sweet sir with her.  I promise you butter would not melt in her mouth, for my Lord Treasurer Cecil hath been to see her, and he has promised to bring her to speech of her Majesty.  May I be there to see.  I promise you ’twill be diamond cut diamond between them.”

“How did she and my Lord Treasurer fare together?” asked Mrs. Babington.

“Well, you know there’s not a man of them all that is proof against her blandishments.  Her Majesty should have women warders for her.  ’Twas good sport to see the furrows in his old brow smoothing out against his will as it were, while she plied him with her tongue.  I never saw the Queen herself win such a smile as came on his lips, but then he is always a sort of master, or tutor, as it were, to the Queen.  Ay,” on some exclamation from Lady Talbot, “she heeds him like no one else.  She may fling out, and run counter to him for the very pleasure of feeling that she has the power, but she will come round at last, and ’tis his will that is done in the long run.  If this lady could beguile him indeed, she might be a free woman in the end.”