"'Tis kind of you to say so, Mr. Commendone, but you over compliment me."
She bent her brows together, lost in serious thought for a moment, and drummed with lean fingers upon the table.
Suddenly she looked up and her face cleared.
"I can say truly," she continued, "that I am a very skilled player. For a woman I can fairly put myself in the first rank. But I have met others surpassing me greatly."
She had thought it out with perfect fairness, with an almost pedantic precision. Woman-like, she was pleased with what the young courtier had said, but she weighed truth in grains and scruples—tithe of mint and cummin, the very word and article of bald fact; always her way.
"And here, Mr. Commendone," she continued, "is my new virginal. It hath come from Firenze, and was made by Nicolo Pedrini himself. My Lord Mayor begged Our acceptance of it."
The virginal was a fine instrument—spinet it came to be called in Elizabeth's reign, from the spines or crow-quills which were attached to the "jacks" and plucked at the strings.
The case was made of cypress wood, inlaid with whorls of thin silver and enamels of various colours.
"We were pleased at the Lord Mayor's courtesy," the Queen concluded, and the change in pronoun showed John that the interview was over in its personal sense, and that he had been very highly honoured.
He bowed, with a murmur of assent, and drew aside to the wall of the room, waiting easily there, a fresh and gallant figure, for any further commands.