I
will believe all good, but no harm of you, lady!"
He sat down, and Master Sandys said gravely: "Men need not be
courtiers to have known of a lady of great wealth and high birth, a
ward of the King's, and both beautiful and pure. I nor no man else,
I think, ever heard aught of the Lady Jocelyn Leigh but what
became a daughter of her line."
A murmur of assent went round the circle. The Governor, leaning
forward from his seat, his wife's hand in his, gravely bent his head.
"All this is known, lady," he said courteously.
She did not answer; her eyes were upon the King's favorite, and the
circle waited with her.
"It is known," said my lord.
She smiled proudly. "For so much grace, thanks, my lord," she
said, then addressed herself again to the Governor: "Your Honor,
that is the past, the long past, the long, long past, though not a year
has gone by. Then I was a girl, proud and careless; now, your
Honor, I am a woman, and I stand here in the dignity of suffering
and peril. I fled from England" - She paused, drew herself up, and
turned upon my lord a face and form so still, and yet so expressive
of noble indignation, outraged womanhood, scorn, and withal a
kind of angry pity, that small wonder if he shrank as from a blow.
"I left the only world I knew," she said. "I took a way low and
narrow and dark and set with thorns, but the only way that I - alone
and helpless and bewildered - could find, because that I, Jocelyn
Leigh, willed not to wed with you, my Lord Carnal.
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