d?" Never yet could she say the
child nay. She held her roses from her and pondered while she gazed. And
her heart was bitter.

"There was an Arden, child, whose blood is in your veins, who fought and
fell at Barnet, crying shrill and fierce, 'Edward my King, St. George
and victory!' And the young Edward, near him as he fell, called to a
knight to lay hand to his heart, for Edward knew and loved him well, and
had received of him money for a long-forgotten debt which young Edward's
father would not press. So Edward called to a knight to lay hand upon
his heart. But he was dead. 'A soldier and a knight,' said he who was
afterward the King, 'and more--an honest man.'"

Then she pushed the boy aside and going swiftly to the house ran to her
room; and face laid in her hands she wept. What had she said in the
bitterness of her feeling? What--even to herself--had she said?

Yet money must be had, she admitted that. But to encumber the estate!

She shrank from her own people knowing; she had inherited more of her
father's estate than her sisters, and there had been feeling, and her
brothers-in-law, Lambert and Webb, would be but upheld in their
prophecies about her husband's capacity to care for her property. She
would not have them know. "Talk it over first with your father, John,"
she told her husband, "or with your brother Henry. Let us not rush
blindly into this thing. You had promised anyhow, you remember, to take
Will out to the sheep-shearing."

VII

So the next morning John Shakespeare swung Will up on the horse before
him, and the two rode away through the chill mistiness of the dawn, Will
kissing his hand back to Mother in the doorway. Bound for Grandfather's
at Snitterfield they were. So out through the town, past the scattering
homesteads with their gardens and orchards, traveled Robin, the stout
gray cob, small Will's chattering voice as high-piped as the bird-calls
through the dawn; on into the open country of meadows and cultivated
fields, the mists lifting rosy before the coming sun, through lanes
with mossy banks, cobwebs spun between the blooming hedgerows heavy with
dew, over the hills, past the straggling ash and hawthorn of the
dingles. And everywhere the cold, moist scent of dawn, and peep and call
of nest-birds.

[Illustration: "Bound for Grandfather's at Snitterfield they were"]

And so early has been their start and so good stout Robin's pace, that
reaching the Snitterfield farm, they f