“The king’s grace was kind,” replied Betty, “and I have good hope, for I believe that now they will hear Simon’s cause; and if they do, all will be well.” “Mayhap it will,” retorted Lady Crabtree dryly, unwilling to cast down the young girl’s new-born hopes; “at least, Cromwell shall do more than shake his head at us. ’Tis well that you struck while the iron was hot and the king was happy; for if they keep up that rout, they will kill both mother and child. Mercy on us, what a baptism! My lord of Canterbury and Mary Tudor walking together, and Norfolk, who loves the papists with all his heart. That ambitious prig, too, my Lord Seymour, who will rise on his sister’s petticoats. It went to my heart to see Anne Boleyn’s baby decked out to march behind this new toy! Well-a-day, ’tis strange!” A little farther on, she burst out laughing; a scornful laugh, too, which startled Betty. “What makes you so merry, madam?” she asked quietly. “Saw you not that fool, the Earl of Wiltshire,” old Madam asked, “with a towel tied around his neck, and carrying my Lord Cranmer’s silver pots, the christening present? Lord! why did he not go fetch his daughter’s head? The drivelling idiot would dance at his own funeral, if he could crook his legs, with the hope to please the king’s grace. ’Tis such a courtier that upsets an honest stomach. Were I the king, I’d send him home with a merry flogging, as an ass.” CHAPTER XXVII THE WIZARD IN THE TOWER SUPERSTITION works its own miracles, and strangely enough, even in the Tower of London, its spell took effect. The royal officers had secured the person of the wizard and had suffered no harm from the contact. It was true that one young man had fallen in a fit at some strange vision in the wizard’s house, but the others were unscathed. Yet the power of the little man’s strange eyes and stranger manner worked upon them, and no prisoner in the Tower was better treated or with more reverence. The warder locked him in with shaking hands, his knees knocking together, and but for the sharper terror of the rope at Tyburn, he might have failed to turn the key upon his captive. The sentinels within the Traitor’s Gate declared that at midnight the small man in a russet cloak passed between them, not in natural shape, but floating past them like a vapor, going through the close-barred wicket to the river and returning again at dawn. Of food, the wizard had an abundance; he had but to express the wish for some new viand, accompanying it with a gruesome prophecy in regard to his keeper’s future, and the dish was immediately forthcoming. They denied him nothing; when other prisoners shivered, he had a fire; when better men languished in the dark, he had twenty tall tapers burning around his room. He was freely supplied with pen and paper, and he filled the sheets with cabalistic signs which froze the blood of his attendants. One of the bolder warders refused to tend his fire for him; the wizard looked up with a strange face and