coldness; "I do not make love to every girl I meet, nor yet do I love
them and leave them as you say. You have been most gravely
misinformed."

"Nay," tripped the maid of honour, with arch quickness of reply, "I
said not that you were naturally equipped for such amorous quests. I
meant to designate your brother Laurence. 'Tis pity he is to be a
clerk. Though one day doubtless he will make a very proper and
consolatory father confessor--"

Sholto walked on in silence, his eyes fixed before him, and in such
high dudgeon that he pretended to be unconscious of what the girl had
been saying. Then the little Margaret began to prattle in her pretty
way, and the youth answered "yes" and "no" sulkily and at random, his
thoughts being alternately on the doing of some great deed to make his
mistress repent her cruelty, and on a leap into the castle pool, in
whose unsunned deeps he might find oblivion from all the flouts of
hard-hearted beauty.

Maud kept her eyes upon him, a smile of satisfaction on her lips so
long as he was not looking at her. She liked to play her fish as
satisfactorily as she could before grassing it at her feet.

"Besides, it will do him good," she said to herself. "He hath lately
won the gold badge of archery, and, like all men, is apt to think
overmuch of himself at such times. Moreover, I can always make it up
to him after--if I like, that is."

But as often as Sholto dropped a little behind, keeping pace with Maid
Margaret's slower palfrey so that Maud was sure he looked at her, the