all my life to be spent so?" She laughed outright, and came to stand
beside him. She put an arm about his neck as she might have put it
about the neck of her father, as she had been in the habit of doing any
day in these past ten years--and thereby made him feel himself to have
reached an unconscionable age. With her hand she rubbed his brow.

"Why, here are wicked wrinkles of ill-humour," she cried to him. "You
are all undone, and by a woman's wit, and you do not like it."

"I am undone by a woman's wilfulness, by a woman's headstrong resolve
not to see."

"You have naught to show me, Sir John."

"Naught? Is all that I have said naught?"

"Words are not things; judgments are not facts. You say that he is so,
and so and so. But when I ask you upon what facts you judge him, your
only answer is that you think him to be what you say he is. Your
thoughts may be honest, Sir John, but your logic is contemptible." And
she laughed again at his gaping discomfiture. "Come, now, deal like an
honest upright judge, and tell me one act of his--one thing that he has
ever done and of which you have sure knowledge--that will bear him out
to be what you say he is. Now, Sir John!"

He looked up at her impatiently. Then, at last he smiled.

"Rogue!" he cried--and upon a distant day he was to bethink him of those
words. "If ever he be brought to judgment I can desire him no better
advocate than thou."