Elizabeth was playing with her infant daughter, tossing the child in
the air, and laughing at its riotous laughter. The stern old Duchess
of Bedford, leaning over the back of the state-chair, looked on with
all a grandmother's pride, and half chanted a nursery rhyme. It was a
sight fair to see! Elizabeth never seemed more lovely: her
artificial, dissimulating smile changed into hearty, maternal glee,
her smooth cheek flushed with exercise, a stray ringlet escaping from
the stiff coif!--And, alas, the moment the two ladies caught sight of
Rivers, all the charm was dissolved; the child was hastily put on the
floor; the queen, half ashamed of being natural, even before her
father, smoothed back the rebel lock, and the duchess, breaking off in
the midst of her grandam song, exclaimed,--

"Well, well! how thrives our policy?"

"The king," answered Rivers, "is in the very mood we could desire. At
the words, 'He durst not!' the Plantagenet sprung up in his breast;
and now, lest he ask to see the rest of the letter, thus I destroy it;
"and flinging the scroll in the blazing hearth, he watched it consume.

"Why this, sir?" said the queen.

"Because, my Elizabeth, the bold words glided off into a decent
gloss,--'He durst not,' said Warwick, 'because what a noble heart
dares least is to belie the plighted word, and what the kind heart
shuns most is to wrong the confiding friend."

"It was fortunate," said the duchess, "that Edward took heat at the
first words, nor stopped, it seems, for the rest!"