his hand.

'I was writing of a letter,' Katharine said. She turned her face
towards him: the stray rays from the globe outlined her red curved
lips, her swelling chest, her low forehead; and it shone like the moon
rising over a hill, yellow and fiery in the hair above her brow. The
lines of her face drooped with her perplexities, and her eyes were
large and shadowed, because she had been shedding many tears.

'Cicely Elliott shall make you a good friend,' he said, with a modest
pride of his property; 'she shall marry me, therefore I do her such
services.'

'You are old for her,' Katharine said.

He laughed.

'Since I have neither chick nor child and am main rich for a subject.'

'Why, she is happy in her servant,' Katharine said abstractedly. 'You
are a very famous knight.'

'There are ballads of me,' he answered complacently. 'I pray to die in
a good tulzie yet.'

'If Cicely Elliott have her scarf in your helmet,' Katharine said, 'I
may not give you mine.' She was considering of her messenger to the
bishop. 'Will you do me a service?'

'Why,' he answered, with a gentle mockery, 'you have one tricksy
swordsman to bear your goodly colours.'

Katharine turned clean about to him and looked at him with attention,
to make out whether he might be such a man as would carry her letter
for her.

He returned her gaze directly, for he was proud of himself and of his
fame. He had fought in all the wars that a man might fight in since he
had been eighteen, and for fifteen years he had been captain of a
troop employed by the Council in keeping back the Scots of the
Borders. It was before Flodden Field that he had done his most famous
deed, about which there were many ballads. Being fallen upon by a bevy
of Scotsmen near a tall hedge, after he had been unhorsed, he had set
his back into a thorn bush, and had fought for many hours in the rear
of the Scottish troop, alone and with only his sword. The ballad that
had been made about him said that seventeen corpses lay in front of
the bush after the English won through to him. But since Cromwell had
broken up the Northern Councils, and filled them again with his own
men of no birth, the old man had come away from the Borders,
disdaining to serve at the orders of knaves that had been butchers'
sons and worse. He owned much land and was very wealthy, and, having
been very abstemious, because he came of an old time when knighthood
had still some of the sacredness and austerit