"Madam, you will kill the woman," wept Mistress Wimpole. "I beseech
you--! 'Tis not seemly, I beseech--"

Mistress Clorinda flung her woman from her and threw the brush at
Mistress Wimpole, crying at her with the lordly rage she had been wont to
shriek with when she wore breeches.

"Damnation to thy seemliness!" she cried, "and to thee too! Get thee
gone--from me, both--get thee gone from my sight!"

And both women fled weeping, and sobbing, and gasping from the room
incontinently.

She was shrewish and sullen with her woman for days after, and it was the
poor creature's labour to keep from her sight, when she dressed her head,
the place from whence the lock had been taken. In the servants' hall the
woman vowed that it was not she who had cut it, that she had had no
accident, though it was true she had used the scissors about her head,
yet it was but in snipping a ribbon, and she had not touched a hair.

"If she were another lady," she said, "I should swear some gallant had
robbed her of it; but, forsooth, she does not allow them to come near
enough for such sport, and with five feet of hair wound up in coronals,
how could a man unwind a lock, even if 'twas permitted him to stand at
her very side."

Two years passed, and the beauty had no greater fields to conquer than
those she found in the country, since her father, Sir Jeoffry, had not
the money to take her to town, he becoming more and more involved and so