Isabel rose and stared into the picture. The pursed lips, the sly, slanting eyes beneath their demure lids, responded mysteriously to her gaze. This was not the woman that Holbein drew in the last hours of her tragedy, weary, worn, and haggard; this was the Queen of his earlier paintings, as he and Lucas Cornelisz saw her in the radiance of triumphant battle, the fierce adventuress-soul that, with nothing in her favour--neither beauty nor position nor wealth--and with everything against her in the fight--a kingdom, a wife, a Church--yet by sheer force of brilliancy, courage, and charm, fought her way at last, through the wreckage of a religion, to the throne of a Queen. ‘Your Grace,’ said Isabel, ‘you and I are friends. You were a pagan like me. What you wanted nothing could stop you from getting, neither armies of enemies nor any silly dread of the price to pay at the end.’ ‘I wish you joy of your friend,’ said Kingston, filled with inexplicable hostility. ‘Ask her what she thought of it all at the end; ask her what she felt that last night at Greenwich, when the King had deserted her, when she was still treated as Queen by people bowing and backing and saying “Your Grace” to her, who in their hearts were all stealthy enemies from whom there was no escape (with bets among themselves as to when her head would be off and a new Queen crowned); when she had to be brave and royal among all those crowding black, invisible dangers, under the descending shadow of the axe. Don’t you think she wished then that she had not been such a pitiless individualist? Don’t you think she wished then that she had been allowed to live and die plain Lady Northumberland?’ ‘Brave and royal you were, your Grace,’ cried Isabel to the picture. ‘You never regretted, did you? If you had, you would have been a poor lath-and-plaster creature, unworthy of what you did. Your nerves gave way for an hour or so. They had been at full stretch for three terrible years of crowned suspense. So it was no wonder they snapped just for a moment in your fall. But it was not death you were afraid of; it was just the crash and the dying. You were a Queen at heart. You fought for your life as a Queen, and in the end it was as a Queen you died. Nobody else, not even in that strong, brutal time, died in such an exaltation of gladness.’ ‘An egoist should not be an idealist as well,’ protested Kingston. ‘You make too pompous a song about a peddling adventuress put shamefully out of the way by a political job.’