Throughout the audience with the papal Nuncio, His Eminence had already seen the storm-clouds gathering thick and fast on the Queen's brow. His Grace of Wessex, gone to fetch a breviary left accidentally on the terrace-coping, had been gone half an hour, and moreover had not yet returned.
Her Majesty had sent a page to request His Grace's presence. The page returned with the intimation that His Grace could not be found.
Someone had spied him in the distance walking towards the river, in company with a lady dressed in white.
Then the storm-clouds had burst.
The Queen peremptorily ordered every one out of the room, then she turned with real Tudor-like fury upon His Eminence.
"My lord Cardinal," she said in a quivering voice, which she did not even try to steady, "an you had your master's wishes at heart, you have indeed gone the wrong way to work."
The Cardinal's keen grey eyes had watched Mary's growing wrath with much amusement. What was a woman's wrath to him? Nothing but an asset, an additional advantage in the political game which he was playing.
Never for a moment did he depart, however, from his attitude of deepest respect, nor from his tone of suave urbanity.
"I seem to have offended Your Majesty," he said gently; "unwittingly, I assure you. . . ."
But Mary was in no mood to bandy polite words with the man who had played her this clever trick. She was angered with herself for having fallen into so clumsy a trap. A thousand suggestions now occurred to her of what she might have done to prevent the meeting between Wessex and Ursula, which the Cardinal had obviously planned.