ne."

"I am sorry," said Matilda, "you should have gone to bed supperless."

"I did not go to bed supperless," said the baron: "I did not go to bed
at all: and what are you doing with that green dress and that bow and
arrow?"

"I am going a-hunting," said Matilda.

"A-hunting!" said the baron. "What, I warrant you, to meet with the
earl, and slip your neck into the same noose?"

"No," said Matilda: "I am not going out of our own woods to-day."

"How do I know that?" said the baron. "What surety have I of that?"

"Here is the friar," said Matilda. "He will be surety."

"Not he," said the baron: "he will undertake nothing but where the devil
is a party concerned."

"Yes, I will," said the friar: "I will undertake any thing for the lady
Matilda."

"No matter for that," said the baron: "she shall not go hunting to day."

"Why, father," said Matilda, "if you coop me up here in this odious
castle, I shall pine and die like a lonely swan on a pool.

"No," said the baron, "the lonely swan does not die on the pool. If
there be a river at hand, she flies to the river, and finds her a mate;
and so shall not you."

"But," said Matilda, "you may send with me any, or as many, of your
grooms as you will."

"My grooms," said the baron, "are all false knaves. There is not a
rascal among them but loves you better than me. Villains that I feed and
clothe."

"Surely," said Matilda, "it is not villany to love me: if it be, I
should be sorry my father were an honest man." The baron relaxed his
muscles into a smile. "Or my lover either," added Matilda. The baron
looked grim again.

"For your lover," said the baron, "you may give God thanks of him. He is
as arrant a knave as ever poached."

"What, for hunting the king's deer?" said Matilda. "Have I not heard you
rail at the forest laws by the hour?"

"Did you ever hear me," said the baron, "rail myself out of house and
land? If I had done that, then were I a knave."

"My lover," said Matilda, "is a brave man, and a true man, and a
generous man, and a young man, and a handsome man; aye, and an honest
man too."

"How can he be an honest man," said the baron, "when he has neither
house nor land, which are the better part of a man?"

"They are but the husk of a man," said Matilda, "the worthless coat of
the chesnut: the man himself is the kernel."

"The man is the grape stone," said the baron, "and the pulp of the
melon. The house and land are the true substantial frui