The intercession was of no avail. Elizabeth sent a letter to Mary denying all charges and begging that they might meet, but the only reply was the order, "Your Grace must away to the Tower." "I am content, inasmuch as it is the queen's pleasure," Elizabeth replied, and the carefully guarded boat set off. It drew up, not at the door which led to the royal apartments of the Tower, but at the one called the Traitors' Gate, where many a prisoner had been landed in the past troublous times. "I am no traitor," said she, "nor will I go in at the Traitors' Gate." "Madam, there is no choice," answered sternly one of the commissioners, but he added kindly, "The rain falls in torrents, will your Grace honor me by making use of my cloak?" Elizabeth flung it down angrily, and put her foot on the step, covered with water as it was. "Here lands as true a subject as ever landed at these steps," she declared solemnly. Up the stairs she was taken, and to the room that was to become her prison. The doors were locked and bolted. She was not without friends even within the walls of the Tower. Both Mary and Elizabeth were fond of children, and Elizabeth especially could always win their hearts. She had not been long a prisoner before one little girl, the child of an officer, began to watch for her when she walked in the garden. "Lady," asked the child, "do you like to be in the Tower?" "No, I do not," answered Elizabeth, "but the doors are locked and I have no key, so I cannot go out." In a few days the little girl came to her with a beaming face. "I want to tell you something," she whispered. "I want to tell it right into your ear." She threw her arms around the princess's neck and whispered: "I've brought you some keys so you needn't always stay here. Now you can open the gates and go out as you will, can't you?" and the child pulled from the bosom of her frock some little keys that she had found. A boy of four years was one of her pets, and used to bring her flowers every day. The council suspected that he was bringing messages to her from another prisoner in the Tower and ordered his father to forbid his speaking to the princess. Nevertheless, the little fellow watched at the bolted door for a chance to say good-by, and called softly, "Lady, I can't bring you any flowers, and I can't come to see you any more." In those times executions followed accusations so easily that Elizabeth was alarmed at every little commotion, and one day she asked anxiously whether the scaffold was still standing on which Lady Jane had been executed. The princess, was indeed, very near death at one time, for the queen's chancellor sent to the Tower an order for her execution. Mary was very ill and not expected to recover, and the chancellor may have thought that only the death of Elizabeth could save England for the Catholic church. The order was delivered to the keeper of the Tower. "Where is the signature of the queen?" he demanded.