." 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