And so life at the court went on. A great family under the same walls, loving and hating. The courtiers divided into factions; their followers being kept from brawling only by the presence of the queen. The serving men followed the example of their betters and squabbled in the kitchen; the butlers drank on the sly in the cellars; the maids chattered in the halls; the pages pilfered from the buttery; the matrons busied in the still rooms compounding fragrant decoctions for perfumes, or bitter doses for medicine; the stewards weighing money in the treasury; gallants dueling in the orchard or meeting their ladies on the stairs. But Francis liked it all. The gallant courtiers with their song and fence, and quibble and prattle and pun; the gaily dressed ladies; the masques in the great hall of the castle; the pomp and ceremony that attended the queen when she went abroad: all appealed to her aesthetic nature. She soon learned to distinguish the courtiers. The Gipsy Earl of Leicester, with his swarthy handsome face; the tall and comely vice chamberlain, Sir Christopher Hatton; the venerable Burleigh; the trusty and wily Walsingham; the gay, witty and sarcastic Harrington, godson of the queen, and the fiery and impetuous Earl of Essex, stepson to Leicester. Sometimes a low, broad-shouldered, heavily-built man would appear at court followed by brawny sailors who bore great chests of gold gathered from the Spanish Main. Then the court would be filled with the deeds of Sir Francis Drake, and of the wondrous happenings in that new world which lay over the sea. Youth does not examine closely below the surface, and so to the girl all was bright and beautiful. She herself would have entered into the life more fully, but that the cloud of the queen's displeasure hung over her. There is no place where a sense of the august disapprobation makes itself so quickly felt as a court. And, as the days went by and Elizabeth still refused to permit her approach, Francis found herself more and more isolated. Even the courtiers who had formerly called upon her to perform services for them now chose other of the pages, while the pages themselves no longer stopped to chat or gossip with her. Thus the days went by. CHAPTER XVI WHAT CAME OF AN OFFER OF FRIENDSHIP One thing had puzzled Francis upon her first arrival at the court. That was the number of those who had red hair. She soon came to know, however, that most of the ladies wore wigs of false hair over their own tresses out of compliment to the queen. The demand for hair was therefore great, and frequently the supply was not equal to it. Divers means were employed to obtain such locks, as the girl soon found to her sorrow. "Where art thou from, my pretty page?" asked a lady one day pausing before her.