'Then will I,' the Lady Mary answered. She made across the room to where the paper lay upon the table beside the great globe of the earth. She came back; she turned her round to the Queen; she made her a deep reverence, so that her black gown spread out stiffly around her, and, keeping her eyes ironically on Katharine's face, she mounted backward up to the chair that was beneath the dais.
Katharine put her hand over her heart.
'What mean you?' she said. 'You have never sat there before.'
'That is not true,' the Lady Mary said harshly. 'For this last three days I have practised how, thus backward, I might climb to this chair and, thus seemly, sit in it.'
'Even then?' Katharine asked.
'Even then I will be asked no more questions,' her step-daughter answered. 'This signifieth that I ha' heard enow o' thy voice, Queen.'
Katharine did not dare to speak, for she knew well this girl's tyrannous and capricious nature. But she was nearly faint with emotion and reached sideways for the chair at the table; there she sat and gazed at the girl beneath the dais, her lips parted, her body leaning forward.
Mary spread out the great sheet of Throckmorton's parchment letter upon her black knees. She bent forward so that the light from the mantel at the room-end might fall upon the writing.
'It seemeth,' she said ironically,'that one descrieth better at the humble end of the room than here on high'—and she read whilst the Queen panted.
At last she raised her eyes and bent them darkly upon the Queen's face.