Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/123

Rh where the old lichen-draped beeches threw their circles of black shadow upon the sunlit sward.

'You have no wish, then, to hear my story?' said she, at last.

'If it pleases you to tell it me,' he answered. 'Oh!' she cried, tossing her head, 'if it is of so little interest to you, we had best let it bide.'

'Nay,' said he eagerly, 'I would fain hear it.'

'You have a right to know it, if you have lost a brother's favour through it. And yet Ah, well, you are, as I understand, a clerk, so I must think of you as one step further in orders, and make you my father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a suitor for my hand, less as I think for my own sweet sake than because he hath ambition, and had it on his mind that he might improve his fortunes by dipping into my father's strong-box—though the Virgin knows that he would have found little enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, a gallant knight and tried soldier of the oldest blood, to whom this man's churlish birth and low descent Oh, lackaday! I had forgot that he was of the same strain as yourself.'

'Nay, trouble not for that,' said Alleyne, 'we are all from good mother Eve.'

'Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and some be foul,' quoth she quickly. 'But, to be brief over the matter, my father would have none of his wooing, nor in sooth would I. On that he swore a vow against us, and as he is known to be a perilous man, with many outlaws and others at his back, my father forbade that I should hawk or hunt in any part of the wood to the north of the Christchurch road. As it chanced, however, this morning my little Roland here was loosed at a strong-winged heron, and page Bertrand and I rode on, with no thoughts but for the sport, until we found ourselves in Minstead woods. Small harm then, but that my horse Troubadour trod with a tender foot upon a sharp stick, rearing and throwing me to the ground. See to my gown, the