"Yea," cried my lady, "I be of the same mind with thee, that if my lord do live in London he is in a manner forced to swim with the tide, and God only knoweth into what a flood of troubles he may thus be led. But I have prevailed on him to go to Kenninghall, and there to enjoy that retired life his father passionately wished him to be contented with. So I do look, if it please God, to happy days when we leave this great city, where so many and great dangers beset us."
"Have you been to court likewise, dear lady?" I asked; and she answered,
"No; her majesty doth deny me that privilege which the wife of a nobleman should enjoy without so much as the asking for it. My Lord Arundel and my Lord Sussex are mad thereon, and swear 'tis the gipsy's doing, as they do always title Lord Leicester, and a sign of his hatred to my lord. But I be not of their mind; for methinks he doth but aid my lord to win the queen's favor by the slights which are put on his wife, which, if he doth take patiently, must needs secure for him such favor as my Lord Leicester should wish, if report speaks truly, none should enjoy but himself."
"But surely," I cried, "my lord's spirit is too noble to stomach so mean a treatment of his lady?"
A burning blush spread over the countess's face, and she answered,
"Constance, nobility of soul is shaped into action by divers motives and influences. And, I pray thee, since his father's death and the loss of his first tutor, who hath my lord had to fashion the aims of his eager spirit to a worthy ambition, and teach him virtuous contentment with a meaner rank and lower fortunes than his birth do entitle him to? He chafes to be degraded, and would fain rise to the heights his ancestors occupied; and, alas! the ladder which those who beset him—for that they would climb after him—do ever set before his eyes is the queen's majesty's favor. 'Tis the breath of their nostrils, the perpetual theme of their discourse. Mine ears sometimes ache with the sound of their oft-repeated words."
Then she broke off her speech for an instant, but soon asked me if to consult fortune-tellers was not a sin.
"Yea," I answered, "the Church doth hold it to be unlawful."
"Ah!" she replied, "I would to God my lord had never resorted to a person of that sort, which hath filled his mind with an apprehension which will work us great evil, if I do mistake not."
"Alas!" I said, "hath my lord been so deluded?"