vely sheet of
water and the wooded slopes beyond. She was sitting with a book in
her lap in the deep of that tall window when he entered, preceded and
announced by Sally Pentreath, who, now her tire-woman, had once been her
nurse.

She rose with a little exclamation of gladness when he appeared under
the lintel--scarce high enough to admit him without stooping--and stood
regarding him across the room with brightened eyes and flushing cheeks.

What need is there to describe her? In the blaze of notoriety into which
she was anon to be thrust by Sir Oliver Tressilian there was scarce a
poet in England who did not sing the grace and loveliness of Rosamund
Godolphin, and in all conscience enough of those fragments have
survived. Like her brother she was tawny headed and she was divinely
tall, though as yet her figure in its girlishness was almost too slender
for her height.

"I had not looked for you so early...." she was beginning, when
she observed that his countenance was oddly stern. "Why... what
has happened?" she cried, her intuitions clamouring loudly of some
mischance.

"Naught to alarm you, sweet; yet something that may vex you." He set an
arm about that lissom waist of hers above the swelling farthingale,
and gently led her back to her chair, then flung himself upon the
window-seat beside her. "You hold Sir John Killigrew in some affection?"
he said between statement and inquiry.

"Why, yes. He was our guardian until my brother came of full age."

Sir Oliver made a wry face. "Aye, there's the rub. Well, I've all but
killed him."

She drew back into her chair, recoiling before him, and he saw horror
leap to her eyes and blench her face. He made haste to explain the
causes that had led to this, he told her briefly of the calumnies
concerning him that Sir John had put about to vent his spite at having
been thwarted in a matter of his coveted licence to build at Smithick.

"That mattered little," he concluded. "I knew these tales concerning
me were abroad, and I held them in the same contempt as I hold their
utterer. But he went further, Rose: he poisoned your brother's mind
against me, and he stirred up in him the slumbering rancour that in my
father's time was want to lie between our houses. To-day Peter came to
me with the clear intent to make a quarrel. He affronted me as no man
has ever dared."

She cried out at that, her already great alarm redoubled. He smiled.

"Do not suppose that I could harm him