'Well, your Grace has not delayed to blossom,' Mary said. It was part of her humour when she was in a taunting mood to call the Queen always 'your Grace' or 'your Majesty' at every turn of the phrase. Katharine looked at the pink intently. Her face had no expression, she was determined at once to have a cheerful patience and not to show it in her face. The little Prince stole his hand into hers. 'Wherefore did my father--_rex pater meus_--pummel the man in the long cloak?' he asked. 'You knew it then?' Katharine asked of her stepdaughter. 'I knew it not,' the Lady Mary answered. 'I saw it from this window, but my sister would not look,' the Prince said. The Queen was going to shut, with her own hand, the door, the little boy trotting behind her, but, purple-clothed and huge, the King was there. 'Well, I will not be shut out in mine own castle,' he said pleasantly. In those, the quiet days of his realm when most things were going well, his face beneath his beard had taken a rounder and a smoother outline. He moved with motions less hasty than those he had had two years before, and when he had cast a task off it was done with and went out of his mind, so that he appeared a very busy man with, between whiles, the leisure to saunter. 'In a half hour,' he said, 'I go north to meet the King o' Scots. I would I had not the long journey to make but could stay with ye. It is pleasant here; the air is livening.' He caught his little son by the armpits and hoisted him on to his purple shoulders. 'Hey, princekin,' he said, 'what news ha' you o' the day?' The little Edward pulled his father's bonnet off that he might the better see the huge brows and the little eyes. 'I told my sister that you did pummel a man in a long gown. What is even "long gown" in the learned tongue?' He played daintily and languidly with the hair of the King's temples, and when the King had said that he might call it '_doctorum toga_,' he added, 'But my sister would not come to look.' 'Well, thy sister is a monstrous learned wench,' the King said with a heavy benignity. 'She could not leave her book.' The Lady Mary stood rigid, with a mock humility. She had her hands clasped before her, the folds of her black skirt fell stiffly just to the ground. She pursed her lips and strove with herself to speak, for she was minded to exhibit disdain, but her black mood was too strong for her. 'I did not read in my book, because I could not,' she said numbly. 'Your son disturbed my reading. But I did not come to look, because I would not.'