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beautiful was because she was unsure of it. How attractive would she be without royalty? I asked myself. But it was impossible to imagine her without it because it was so much a part of her. I would study my long lashes, my heavily marked brows, my luminous dark eyes and rather narrow face framed in masses of honey-yellow hair and exultantly compare my face with that pale one with its almost invisible lashes and brows, its imperious nose, its white, white skin which made her look almost delicate. I knew that any unprejudiced observer would admit that I was the beauty. But her royalty was there and with it the knowledge that she was the sun and the rest of us merely planets revolving around her, dependent on her for our light. In the days before she had become Queen she had been delicate and had suffered several illnesses during her hazardous youth and had, so we had heard, often been on the point of death. Now she was Queen she seemed to have thrown off these ailments; they had been the growing pains of royalty; but even when she had dispensed with them the pallor of her skin preserved the air of delicacy. When she painted her face, which she loved to do, she lost that look of fragility, but whatever she did, the royalty remained, and that was something with which no woman could compete.
    She talked to me more frankly than she did to most of her ladies. I think it was due to the family connection. She enjoyed clothes inordinately and we often talked of them in a most frivolous fashion. She had so many gowns that even the wardrobe women could not be sure of the number; her figure was slender and the fashions which were so hard on plump women became her as well as they could any. She endured tight lacing and the uncomfortable whalebone busks we had to wear because they called attention to the tiny waist; and her ruffs were of gold and silver lace and frequently magnificently jeweled. Even in those days she sometimes wore what we called ead-borrowed hair false pieces to give additional body to her red-gold locks.
    I am writing of the days before the Amy Robsart scandal. She was never quite so lighthearted after that, never quite so carefree. In spite of her incessant demand for expressions of wonder at her perfections she was always ready to learn from experience. That was another of the many contrasts which made up her complex nature. She would never chatter so freely to anyone again as she did to me before the tragedy.
    I think in those days she really might have married Robert if he had been free; but at the same time I sensed that she was not too unhappy about his previous attachment, which made her marriage to Robert impossible. This I was too naive to realize at the time and I believed that the reason she was pleased he was married to Amy Robsart was solely because that marriage had saved him from an alliance with Lady Jane Grey. But that was too simple an explanation. It was obvious that I had a great deal to learn then about that devious mind.
    She talked of him to me and I often smile to recall those conversations now. Even she, with all her power, could not see into the future. He was her weet Robin.She called him fondly her yes,because he was always on the watch for her well-being, she told me. She enjoyed giving pet names to the handsome men who surrounded her. None, though, could compare with her Eyes. We were all certain that she would have married him if he had had no wife, but when that encumbrance was removed she was too wily to step into the trap. Few women would have been as wise. Should I? I wondered. I doubted it.
    e were in the Tower together,she told me once, because of Wyatt rebellion, Rob because of the Jane Grey matter. Poor Rob, he always said he had no great feeling for it and that he would have given all he had to see me on the throne.I saw the soft look come into her face which changed it completely. That rather hawklike expression completely disappeared, and she was soft and feminine suddenly. Not