Udal stood perfectly still, looking at nothing, his thin brown hand clasped round his thin brown chin.
'But, above all,' Throckmorton had concluded, 'show ye no papers to Kat Howard. For it is very certain that she will have no falsehoods employed to bring down Privy Seal, though she hate him as the Assyrian cockatrice hateth the symbol of the Cross.'
'Sir Throckmorton,' Margot Poins had uttered, 'though ye be a paid spy, ye speak true words there.'
He pulled his beard and blinked at her.
'I am minded to reform,' he said. 'Your mistress hath worked a miracle of conversion in me.'
She shrugged her great fair shoulders at this, and spoke to the magister:
'It is very true,' she said, 'that this spying knight affects my mistress. But whether it be for the love of virtue, or for the love of her body, or because the cat jumps that way and there he observeth fortune to rise, I leave to God who reads all hearts.'
'There speaks a wench brought up and taught by Protestants,' Throckmorton gibed pleasantly at her; 'or ye have caught the trick of Kat Howard, who, though she be a Papist as good as I, yet prates virtue like a Lutheran.'
'Ye lie!' Margot said; 'my mistress getteth her virtue from good letters.'
Throckmorton smiled at her again.