ee-and-twenty that day, and his simple dress, a tunic of thick wool
fastened round him with a leathern belt, to which hung a short sword,
showed that his degree was modest.

The girl, although she seemed his elder, in fact was only in her
twentieth year. Yet from her who had been reared in the hard school of
that cruel age childhood had long departed, leaving her a ripened woman
before her time.

This pair stood looking at each other.

"Well, Cousin Eve Clavering," said the man, in his clear voice, "why did
your message bid me meet you in this cold place?"

"Because I had a word to say to you, Cousin Hugh de Cressi," she
answered boldly; "and the marsh being so cold and so lonesome I thought
it suited to my purpose. Does Grey Dick watch yonder?"

"Ay, behind those willows, arrow on string, and God help him on whom
Dick draws! But what was that word, Eve?"

"One easy to understand," she replied, looking him in the
eyes--"Farewell!"

He shivered as though with the cold, and his face changed.

"An ill birthday greeting, yet I feared it," he muttered huskily, "but
why more now than at any other time?"

"Would you know, Hugh? Well, the story is short, so I'll let it out. Our
great-grandmother, the heiress of the de Cheneys, married twice, did she
not, and from the first husband came the de Cressis, and from the second
the Claverings. But in this way or in that we Claverings got the
lands, or most of them, and you de Cressis, the nobler stock, took to
merchandise. Now since those days you have grown rich with your
fishing fleets, your wool mart, and your ferry dues at Walberswick and
Southwold. We, too, are rich in manors and land, counting our acres by
the thousand, but yet poor, lacking your gold, though yonder manor"--and
she pointed to some towers which rose far away above the trees upon
the high land--"has many mouths to feed. Also the sea has robbed us at
Dunwich, where I was born, taking our great house and sundry streets
that paid us rent, and your market of Southwold has starved out ours at
Blythburgh."

"Well, what has all this to do with you and me, Eve?"

"Much, Hugh, as you should know who have been bred to trade," and she
glanced at his merchant's dress. "Between de Cressi and Clavering there
has been rivalry and feud for three long generations. When we were
children it abated for a while, since your father lent money to mine,
and that is why they suffered us to grow up side by side. But then they