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." After a pause he went on with a grin: "I doubt I came late, hows'ever. Sir Guy hath had his say, I'm thinkin'!" and he chuckled audibly. "Now you mind your own business, Gregory!" said Phoebe, sharply. His face fell, and during the rest of their ride he maintained a rigid silence. * * * * * The next morning found Phoebe sitting in her room in the Peacock Inn, silently meditating in an effort to establish order in the chaos of her mind. Her hands lay passively in her lap, and between her fingers was an open sheet of paper whose crisp folds showed it to be a letter. Daily contact with the people, customs, dress, and tongue of Elizabethan England was fast giving to her memories of the nineteenth century the dim seeming of a dream. As she came successively into contact with each new-old acquaintance, he took his place in her heart and mind full grown--completely equipped with all the associations, loves, and antipathies of long familiarity. Gregory had brought her to the inn the night before, and here she had received the boisterous welcome of old Isaac Burton and the cooler greeting of his dame, her step-mother. They took their places in her heart, and she was not surprised to find it by no means a high one. The old lady was overbearing and far from loving toward Mistress Mary, as Phoebe began to call herself. As for Isaac Burton, he seemed quite subject to his wife's will, and Phoebe found herself greatly estranged from him. That first afternoon, however, had transported her into a paradise the joys of which even Dame Burton could not spoil. Sitting in one of the exterior galleries overlooking the courtyard of the inn, Phoebe had witnessed a play given on a rough staging erected in the open air. The play was "The Merchant of Venice," and who can tell the thrills that tingled through Phoebe's frame as, with dry lips and a beating heart, she gazed down upon Shylock. Behind that great false beard was the face of England's mightiest poet. That wig concealed the noble forehead so revered by high and low in the home she had left behind. She was Phoebe Wise, and only Phoebe, that afternoon, enjoying to the full the privilege which chance had thrown in her way. And now, the morning after, she went over it all again in memory. She rehearsed mentally every gesture and intonation of the poet-actor, upon whom alone she had riveted her attention throughout the play, foll
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