for a London apprentice! I shall be laying a complaint before the lord
mayor against Dame Vernon, for unsettling the mind of my apprentice, and
setting him above his work. And the little lady, what said she? Did she
give you her colours and bid you wear them at a tourney?"

Walter coloured hotly.

"Ah! I have touched you," laughed the armourer; "come now, out with the
truth. My lad," he added more gravely, "there is no shame in it; you know
that I have always encouraged your wishes to be a soldier, and have done my
best to render you as good a one as any who draws sword 'neath the king's
banner, and assuredly I would not have taken all these pains with you did I
think that you were always to wear an iron cap and trail a pike. I too,
lad, hope some day to see you a valiant knight, and have reasons that you
wot not of, for my belief that it will be so. No man rises to rank and fame
any the less quickly because he thinks that bright eyes will grow brighter
at his success."

"But, Geoffrey, you are talking surely at random. The Lady Edith Vernon is
but a child; a very beautiful child," he added reverently, "and such that
when she grows up, the bravest knight in England might be proud to win.
What folly for me, the son of a city bowyer, and as yet but an apprentice,
to raise mine eyes so high!"

"The higher one looks the higher one goes," the armourer said
sententiously. "You aspire some day to become a knight, you may well
aspire also to win the hand of Mistress Edith Vernon. She is five years
younger than yourself, and you will be twenty-two when she is seventeen.
You have time to make your way yet, and I tell you, though why it matters
not, that I would rather you set your heart on winning Mistress Edith