nd was encircling Will, holding
to her skirt. She was tall, with both grace and state, and there was a
chestnut warmth in the hair about her clear, white brow and nape, and in
the brown of her serene and tender eyes. These eyes smiled at John
Shakespeare with a hint of upbraiding, and she shook her head at him
with playful reproach.

Little Will saw her do it. He knew too how to interpret such a look. Had
Father been naughty?

"You are not selling more of the timber, John?" asked Mother.

"Say the word, Mistress Mary Arden of the Asbies," says Father grandly,
"and I stop the bargain with your Cousin Lambert where it stands. 'Tis
yours to say about your own. Though nothing spend, how shall a man live
up to his state? But it shall be as you say, although 'tis for you and
the boy. He is the chief bailiff's son--his Dad can feel he has given
him that, but would have him more. I have never forgot your people felt
their Mary stepped down to wed a Shakespeare. I have applied to the
Herald's College for a grant of arms. The Shakespeares are as good as
any who fought to place the crown on Henry VII's head. But it shall be
stopped. The land and the timber on it is Mistress Mary Shakespeare's,
not mine."

But Mary, pushing little Will aside clung to her husband's arm, and the
warmth in her tender eyes deepened to something akin to yearning as they
looked up at him. With the man of her choice, and her children--with
these Mary Shakespeare's life and heart were full. There was no room for
ambition for she was content. Had life been any sweeter to her as Mary
Arden of the Asbies, daughter of a gentleman, than as Mary Shakespeare,
wife of a dealer in leathers? Nay, nor as sweet!

But she could not make her husband see it so. Yet--and she looked up at
him with a sudden passion of love in that gaze--it was this big,
sanguine, restless, masterful spirit in him that had won her. From the
narrow, restricted conditions of a provincial gentlewoman's life, she
had looked out into a bigger world for living, through the eyes of this
masterful yeoman, his heart big with desire to conquer and ambition to
achieve. Was her faith in his capacity to know and seize the essential
in his venturing, less now than then? Never, never--not that, not that!

"Do as you will about it, John," begs Mary, her cheek against his arm,
"only--is it kind to say the land is mine? We talked that all out once,
goodman mine. Only this one thing more, John, for I wou