is behaviour. Surely
thought I, he might wait a while till I had done my love-making, and
if he would not wait I could find a means to make him do so. Not twenty
paces from us the horse stood cropping the grass. I went to him and
undid his bridle rein, and with it fastened the Spaniard to a small
wayside tree as best I was able.

'Now, here you stay,' I said, 'till I am ready to fetch you;' and I
turned to go.

But as I went a great doubt took me, and once more I remembered my
mother's fear, and how my father had ridden in haste to Yarmouth
on business about a Spaniard. Now to-day a Spaniard had wandered to
Ditchingham, and when he learned my name had fallen upon me madly trying
to kill me. Was not this the man whom my mother feared, and was it right
that I should leave him thus that I might go maying with my dear? I knew
in my breast that it was not right, but I was so set upon my desire and
so strongly did my heartstrings pull me towards her whose white robe
now fluttered on the slope of the Park Hill, that I never heeded the
warning.

Well had it been for me if I had done so, and well for some who were yet
unborn. Then they had never known death, nor I the land of exile, the
taste of slavery, and the altar of sacrifice.

CHAPTER IV

THOMAS TELLS HIS LOVE

Having made the Spaniard as fast as I could, his arms being bound to the
tree behind him, and taking his sword with me, I began to run hard after
Lily and caught her not too soon, for in one more minute she would have
turned along the road that runs to the watering and over the bridge by
the Park Hill path to the Hall.

Hearing my footsteps, she faced about to greet me, or rather as though
to see who it was that followed her. There she stood in the evening
light, a bough of hawthorn bloom in her hand, and my heart beat yet
more wildly at the sight of her. Never had she seemed fairer than as she
stood thus in her white robe, a look of amaze upon her face and in
her grey eyes, that was half real half feigned, and with the sunlight
shifting on her auburn hair that showed beneath her little bonnet. Lily
was no round-checked country maid with few beauties save those of health
and youth, but a tall and shapely lady who had ripened early to her full
grace and sweetness, and so it came about that though we were almost of
an age, yet in her presence I felt always as though I were the younger.
Thus in my love for her was mingled some touch of reverence.

'Oh!