casion, and when
thou hast a better house in London I will come share it.'

'Trapped! Trapped!' the magister muttered to himself. 'Even as was Sir
Launcelot!'

He considered of the fair and resentful Margot Poins whom it was
incumbent indeed that he should wed: that Katharine Howard loved her
well and was in these matters strait-laced. When his eyes measured his
wife he licked his lips; when his eyes were on the floor his jaw fell.
At best the new Mistress Udal would be in Paris. He looked at the rope
tied round the thin middle of the brown priest, and suddenly he leered
and cast off his cloak.

'Let me remember to keep an equal mind in these hard matters,' he
quoted, and fell to laughing.

For he remembered that in England no marriage by a friar or monk held
good in those years. Therefore he was the winner. And the long, square
room, with the cave bed behind its shutter in the hollow of the wall,
the light-coloured, square beams, and the foaming basin of bride-ale
that a fat-armed girl in a blue kerseymere gown served out to scullion
after scullion; the open windows from which a little knave was casting
bride-pennies to some screaming beggars and women in the street; the
blind hornman whose unseeing eyes glanced along the reed of his
bassoon that he played before the open door; the two saucy maids
striving to wrest the bride's stockings one from the other--all these
things appeared friendly and jovial in his eyes. So that, when one of
the maids, wresting the stocking, fell hard against him, he clasped
her in his arms and kissed her till she struggled from him to drink a
mug of bride-ale.

'_Hodie mihi: mihi atque cras!_' he said. For it was in his mind a
goodly thing to pay a usuress with base coins.

II

It was three days later, in the morning, that his captress said to the
Magister Udal:

'Husband, it is time that I gave thee the bridal gift.'

The magister, happy with a bellyful of carp, bread and breakfast ale,
muttered 'Anan?' from above his copy of Lucretius. He sat in the
window-seat of the great stone kitchen. Upon one long iron spit before
the fire fourteen trussed capons turned in unison; the wooden shoes of
the basting-maid clattered industriously; and from the chimney came
the clank of the invisible smoke-vanes and the be-sooted chains. The
magister, who loved above all things warmth, a full stomach, a
comfortable woman and a good book, had all these things; he was well
minded to stay in Pa