answer, for the mob of sturdy fishermen,
many of whom had served in the French wars, looked threatening, he
and his following rode away through the Ipswich gate and out on to the
moorlands beyond, which some of them knew but too well.

All the rest of that day they rode slowly, but when night came, having
halted their horses at a farm and given it out that they meant to push
on to Woodbridge, they turned up a by-track on the lonely heath, and,
unseen by any, made their through the darkness to a certain empty house
in the marshes not far from Beccles town. This house, called Frog Hall,
was part of Acour's estate, and because of the ague prevalent there in
autumn, had been long unattended. Nor did any visit it at this season of
the year, when no cattle grazed upon these salt marshes.

Here, then, he and his people lay hid, cursing their fortunes, since,
notwithstanding the provisions that they had conveyed thither in secret,
the place was icy cold in the bitter, easterly winds which tore over
it from the sea. So lonely was it, also, that the Frenchmen swore that
their comrades slain by Grey Dick haunted them at nights, bidding them
prepare to join the number of the dead. Indeed, had not Acour vowed that
he would hang the first man who attempted to desert, some of them would
have left him to make the best of their way back to France. For always
as they crouched by the smoking hearth they dreamed of Grey Dick and his
terrible arrows.

Sir Edmund Acour's letter came safely into the hands of Eve, brought to
her by the Mayor himself. It read thus:

Lady,

You will no more of me, so however much you should live to ask it, I
will have no more of you. I go hang your merchant lout, and afterward
away to France, who wish to have done with your cold Suffolk, where you
may buy my lands cheap if you will. Yet, should Master Hugh de Cressi
chance to escape me, I counsel you to marry him, for I can wish you no
worse fate, seeing what you will be, than to remember what you might
have been. Meanwhile it is my duty as a Christian to tell you, in case
you should desire to speak to him ere it be too late, that your father
lies at the point of death from a sickness brought on by his grief at
the slaying of his son and your cruel desertion of him, and calls for
you in his ravings. May God forgive you, as I try to do, all the evil
that you have wrought, which, perhaps, is not done with yet. Unless Fate
should bring us together again, for