“And your old playmate in her glory?”
“Yea, madame. It almost forestalled the glories of Heaven!”
“Ah! child, may the aping of such glory beforehand not unfit us for the veritable everlasting glories, when all these things shall be no more.”
The Duchess clasped her hands, almost as a foreboding of the day when her son’s corpse should lie, forsaken, gashed, and stripped, beside the marsh.
But she turned to Grisell asking if she had come with any petition.
“Only, madame, that it would please your Highness to put into the hands of the new Duchess herself, this offering, without naming me.”
She produced her exquisite fabric, which was tied with ribbons of blue and silver in an outer case, worked with the White Rose.
The Dowager-Duchess exclaimed, “Nay, but this is more beauteous than all you have wrought before. Ah! here is your own device! I see there is purpose in these patterns of your web. And am I not to name you?”
“I pray your Highness to be silent, unless the Duchess should divine the worker. Nay, it is scarce to be thought that she will.”
“Yet you have put the flower that my English mother called ‘Forget-me-not.’ Ah, maiden, has it a purpose?”