r of my wall?'

The magister answered angrily:

'Privy Seal hath swallowed thy land: he shall not disgorge. But this
man he shall swallow. Know you not that you may make a jack swallow,
but no man shall make him give back; I, nor thou, nor the devil's
self?'

'Oh, a God's name bring not Flail Crummock into this household,' the
young man cut in. 'Would you undo us all?'

'Ignoble, ignoble, to twit a man with that Eton villainy,' the
magister answered.

'A God's name bring not Privy Seal into the quarrel,' the young man
repeated. 'None of us of the Old Faith believe that lie.'

'Keep thy tongue off Cromwell's name, young fool,' his grandfather
said. 'We know not what walls have ears.'

The young man went pale: the printer himself went pale, remembering
suddenly that the magister was a spy of Cromwell's; all three of them
had their eyes upon Udal; only the old man, with his carelessness of
his great age, grinned with curiosity as if the matter were a play
that did not concern him. The magister was making for the door with
the books beneath his arm and a torturing smile round his lips. The
boy, with a deep oath, ran out after him, a scarlet flash in the
darkening room.

Old Badge pulled at his nose and grinned maliciously at the fire
beside him.

'That is thy deliverer: that is thy flail of the monks,' he croaked at
his son. The printer gazed moodily at the fire.

'Nay, it is but one of his servants,' he answered mechanically.

'And such servants go up and down this realm of England and ride us
with iron bridles.' The old man laughed dryly and bitterly. 'His
servant? See how we are held--we dare not shut our doors upon him
since he is Cromwell's servant, yet if he come in he shall ruin us,
take our money that we dare not refuse, deflower our virgins.... What
then is left to us between this setter up of walls and his servants?'

The printer, fingering the T-square in his belt, said, slowly, 'I
think this man loves too well that books should be printed in the
Latin tongue to ruin any printer of them upon a private quarrel. Else
I would get me across the seas.'

'He loves any wench much better,' the old man answered maliciously.
'Hearken!'

Through the wall there came a scuffling sound, thumps, and the noise
of things falling. The wall there touched on the one that Cromwell had
set up, so that there was bare room for a man to creep between.

'Body of God,' the printer said, 'is he eavesdropping now?'

'Na