"A quarter of an hour, Your Majesty," he said insinuatingly, when first on that same morning he had broached the subject, "fifteen short minutes, during which the breach 'twixt His Grace and a disgraced maiden can but be irretrievably widened."
"Your Eminence seems to think that I desire a breach," retorted Mary with Tudor-like haughtiness.
"Far from me even to think such a thought," rejoined the Cardinal blandly; "but as a faithful servant of Your Majesty, soon to become a loyal subject when Your Grace is Queen of Spain, I hold the welfare of all those whom you deign to honour very much at heart. . . . And I was thinking of His Grace of Wessex."
"What of him, my lord?"
"The Duke is proud, Your Majesty; would it be well, think you, if a girl of Lady Ursula Glynde's reputation were to become Duchess of Wessex?"
"Think you she hath the desire?"
"Quien sabe?" he replied guardedly, "but an Your Majesty will trust my judgment, a brief interview with His Grace would soon scatter her hopes to the winds."
Thus did this astute diplomatist play upon every fibre of a woman's emotions. His calculations were made to a nicety—only the interview which Ursula had demanded and no more! This to pacify the young girl in case she became defiant, but the meeting itself just short enough to avoid any harm.
At twenty minutes before two, Ursula was bidden to the Great Hall by command of Her Majesty. The Duchess of Lincoln—tearful and kind—received her in the great window embrasure. Her motherly heart ached to see the bitter sorrow of the beautiful girl, who had been so full of vitality and merriment a brief fortnight ago.
With a strange instinct, which she herself could not have explained, Ursula had dressed herself all in white. A rich brocaded kirtle and shimmery silken paniers seemed to accentuate the dull pallor of her cheeks. Only her golden hair gave a brilliant note of colour and of life to this marble statue, who seemed only to exist through its blue magnetic eyes.