to part--"

"Nay, now, Steve, where be all your plots for bravery? You always
meant to seek your fortune--not bide here like an acorn for ever."

"I never thought to be thrust forth the very day of our poor
father's burial, by a shrewish town-bred vixen, and a base narrow-
souled--"

"Hist! hist!" said the more prudent Ambrose.

"Let him hear who will! He cannot do worse for us than he has done!
All the Forest will cry shame on him for a mean-hearted skinflint to
turn his brothers from their home, ere their father and his, be cold
in his grave," cried Stephen, clenching the grass with his hands, in
his passionate sense of wrong.

"That's womanish," said Ambrose.

"Who'll be the woman when the time comes for drawing cold steel?"
cried Stephen, sitting up.

At that moment there came through the porch a man, a few years over
thirty, likewise in mourning, with a paler, sharper countenance than
the brothers, and an uncomfortable pleading expression of self-
justification.

"How now, lads!" he said, "what means this passion? You have taken
the matter too hastily. There was no thought that ye should part
till you had some purpose in view. Nay, we should be fain for