with twinkling eyes and
not a whit put out. "But I also am going to London."

I smiled, for it did not seem as though she would be a powerful friend,
or able to open any way for me. But she met my smile with another so
full of confidence and challenge that my attention was wholly caught,
and I did not heed the Vicar's farewell as he rose and left us.

"And would you serve me," I asked, "if you had the power?"

"Nay, put the question as you think it," said she. "Would you have the
power to serve me if you had the will? Is not that the doubt in your
mind?"

"And if it were?"

"Then, indeed, I do not know how to answer; but strange things happen
there in London, and it may be that some day even I should have some
power."

"And you would use it for me?"

"Could I do less on behalf of a gentleman who has risked his mistress's
favour for my poor cheek's sake?" And she fell to laughing again, her
mirth growing greater as I turned red in the face. "You mustn't blush
when you come to town," she cried, "or they'll make a ballad on you, and
cry you in the streets for a monster."

"The oftener comes the cause, the rarer shall the effect be," said I.

"The excuse is well put," she conceded. "We should make a wit of you in
town."

"What do you in town?" I asked squarely, looking her full in the eyes.

"Perhaps, sometimes," she laughed, "what I have done once--and to your
good knowledge--since I came to the country."

Thus she would baffle me with jesting answers as often as I sought to
find out who and what she was. Nor had I better fortune with her mother,
for whom I had small liking, and who had, as it seemed, no more for me.
For she was short in her talk, and frowned to see me with her daughter.
Yet she saw me, I must confess, often with Cydaria in the next days, and
I was often with Cydaria when she did not see me. For Barbara was gone,
leaving me both sore and lonely, all in the mood to find comfort where I
could, and to see manliness in desertion; and there was a charm about
the girl that grew on me insensibly and without my will until I came to
love, not her (as I believed, forgetting that Love loves not to mark his
boundaries too strictly) but her merry temper, her wit and cheerfulness.
Moreover, these things were mingled and spiced with others, more
attractive than all to unfledged youth, an air of the world and a
knowledge of life which piqued my curiosity and sat (it seems so even to
my later mind as I look