for her Magister Udal as a companion and preceptor who might both please her with his erudition and induce her to look kindly upon the New Learning and a more lax habit of mind. But she never thanked Cromwell. Whilst he talked she remained frozen and silent. At times, under the spur of a cold rage, she said harsh things of himself and her father, calling upon the memory of her mother and the wrongs her Church had suffered--and, on his departing, before he had even left the room she would return, frigidly and without change of face, to the book upon her desk. So the Privy Seal talked to her by the window for the fiftieth time. Katharine Howard saw, before the high reading pulpit, the back of a man in the long robes of a Master of Arts. He held a pen in his hand and turned over his shoulder at her a face thin, brown, humorous and deprecatory, as if he were used to bearing chiding with philosophy. 'Magister Udal!' she uttered. He motioned with his mouth for her to be silent, but pointed with the feather of his quill to a line of a little book that lay upon the pulpit near his elbow. She came closer to read: '_Circumspectatrix cum oculis emisitiis!_' and written above it in a minute hand: 'A spie with eyes that peer about and stick out.' He pointed over his shoulder at the Lord Privy Seal. 'How poor this room is, for a King's daughter!' she said, without much dropping her voice. He hissed: 'Hush! hush!' with an appearance of terror, and whispered, forming the words with his lips rather than uttering them: 'How fared you and your house in the nonce?' 'I have read in many texts,' she answered, 'to pass the heavy hours.' He spoke then, aloud and with an admonitory air: 'Never say the heavy hours--for what hours are heavy that can be spent with the ancient writers for companions?' She avoided his reproachful eyes with: 'My father's house was burnt last month; my cousin Culpepper is in the courts below. Dear Nick Ardham, with his lute, is dead an outlaw beyond sea, and Sir Ferris was hanged at Doncaster--both after last year's rising, pray all good men that God assail them!' Udal muttered: 'Hush, for God's dear sake. That is treason here. There is a listener behind the hangings.' He began to scrawl hastily with a dry pen that he had not time to dip in the well of ink. The shadow of the Lord Cromwell's silent return was cast upon them both, and Katharine shivered. He said harshly to the magister: 'I will that you write me an interlude in the vulgar tongue in three days' time. Such a piece as being spoken by skilful players may make a sad man laugh.' Udal said: 'Well-a-day!' 'It shall get you advancement. I am minded the piece shall be given at my house before his Highness and the new Queen in a week.' Udal remained silent, dejected, his head resting upon his breast.