She was still silent—shaken into thinking of the past she had had with her cousin when she had been very poor in Lincolnshire; she had had leisure to read good letters there, and the time to think of them. Now she had not held a book for four days on end.
'You are in a very great danger of your cousin,' Throckmorton was repeating. 'Yet I will stay his coming.'
'Knight,' she said, 'this is a folly. If guards be needed to keep me from his knife, the King shall give me guards.'
'His knife!' Throckmorton raised his hands in mock surprise. 'His knife is a very little thing.'
'Ye would not say it an ye had come anear him when he was crossed,' she said. 'I, who am passing brave, fear his knife more than aught else in this world.'
'Oh, incorrigible woman,' he cried, 'thinking ever of straight things and clear doings. It is not the knife of your cousin, but the devious policy of Privy Seal that calleth for fear.'
'Why, or ever Privy Seal bind Tom to his policy he shall bind iron bars to make a coil.'
He looked at her with lifted eyebrows, and then scratched with his finger nail a tiny speck of mud from his shoe-point, balancing himself back against the chimney piece and crossing his red legs above the knees.
'Madam Howard,' he said, 'Privy Seal is minded to use thy cousin for a battering-ram.' She was hardly minded to listen to him, and he uttered stealthily, as if he were sure of moving her: 'Thy cousin shall breach a way to the ears of the King—for thy ill fame to enter in.'
She leaned forward a little.