"I have brought you twenty score of arrowheads, Master Giles," he said.
"They have been longer in hand than is usual with me, but I have been
pressed. And how goes it with the lady whom I brought to your door last
week?"

"But sadly, Master Ward, very sadly, as I told you when I came across to
thank you again in her name and my own for your kindness to her. She was
but in poor plight after her journey; poor thing, she was little accustomed
to such wet and hardship, and doubtless they took all the more effect
because she was low in spirit and weakened with much grieving. That night
she was taken with a sort of fever, hot and cold by turns, and at times off
her head. Since then she has lain in a high fever and does not know even my
wife; her thoughts ever go back to the storming of the castle, and she
cries aloud and begs them to spare her lord's life. It is pitiful to hear
her. The leech gives but small hope for her life, and in troth, Master
Ward, methinks that God would deal most gently with her were He to take
her. Her heart is already in her husband's grave, for she was ever of a
most loving and faithful nature. Here there would be little comfort for her
- she would fret that her boy would never inherit the lands of his father;
and although she knows well enough that she would be always welcome here,
and that Bertha would serve her as gladly and faithfully as ever she did
when she was her nurse, yet she could not but greatly feel the change. She
was tenderly brought up, being, as I told you last week, the only daughter
of Sir Harold Broome. Her brother, who but a year ago became lord of
Broomecastle at the death of his father, was one of the queen's men, and it
was he, I believe, who brought Sir Roland Somers to that side. He was slain
on the same night as Mortimer, and his lands, like those of Sir Roland,
have been seized by the crown. The child upstairs is by right heir to both
estates, seeing that his uncle died unmarried. They will doubtless be
conferred upon those who have aided the young king in freeing himself from