Madge remained with her, and I, coward-like, feared to face the girl to whom I had been untrue.
Dorothy's one and only desire, of course, was to see John, but that desire for a time seemed impossible of accomplishment.
Elizabeth, Cecil, Leicester, and Sir William St.Loe were in secret consultation many times during three or four days and nights.

Occasionally Sir George was called into their councils, and that flattering attention so wrought upon the old man's pride that he was a slave to the queen's slightest wish, and was more tyrannical and dictatorial than ever before to all the rest of mankind.

There were, however, two persons besides the queen before whom Sir George was gracious: one of these was Mary Stuart, whose powers of fascination had been brought to bear upon the King of the Peak most effectively.

The other was Leicester, to whom, as my cousin expressed it, he hoped to dispose of that troublesome and disturbing body--Dorothy.

These influences, together with the fact that his enemies of Rutland were in the Haddon dungeon, had given Sir George a spleen-vent, and Dorothy, even in the face of her father's discovery that Manners was her mysterious lover, had for once a respite from Sir George's just and mighty wrath.
The purpose of Elizabeth's many councils of war was to devise some means of obtaining from John and his father, information concerning the plot, which had resulted in bringing Mary Stuart into England.