ter me in my great need."

"Aye, that will we willingly," Giles said. "Was not Bertha your nurse?
and to whom should you come if not to her? But will it please you to
mount the stairs, for Bertha will not forgive me if I keep you talking
down here. What a joy it will be to her to see you again!"

So saying, Giles led the way to the apartment above. There was a scream
of surprise and joy from his wife, and then Giles quietly withdrew
downstairs again, leaving the women to cry in each other's arms.

A few days later Geoffrey Ward entered the shop of Giles Fletcher.

"I have brought you twenty score of arrowheads, Master Giles," he said.
"They have been longer in hand than is usual with me, but I have been
pressed. And how goes it with the lady whom I brought to your door last
week?"

"But sadly, Master Ward, very sadly, as I told you when I came across to
thank you again in her name and my own for your kindness to her. She
was but in poor plight after her journey; poor thing, she was little
accustomed to such wet and hardship, and doubtless they took all
the more effect because she was low in spirit and weakened with much
grieving. That night she was taken with a sort of fever, hot and cold
by turns, and at times off her head. Since then she has lain in a high
fever and does not know even my wife; her thoughts ever go back to the
storming of the castle, and she cries aloud and begs them to spare her
lord's life. It is pitiful to hear her. The leech gives but small hope
for her life, and in troth, Master Ward, methinks that God would deal
most gently with her were He to take her. Her heart is already in her
husband's grave, for she was ever of a most loving and faithful nature.
Here there would be little comfort for her--she would fret that her boy
would never inherit the lands of his father; and although she knows
well enough that she would be always welcome here, and that Bertha would
serve her as gladly and faithfully as ever she did when she was her
nurse, yet she could not but greatly feel the change. She was tenderly
brought up, being, as I told you last week, the only daughter of
Sir Harold Broome. Her brother, who but a year ago became lord of
Broomecastle at the death of his father, was one of the queen's men, and
it was he, I believe, who brought Sir Roland Somers to that side. He was
slain on the same night as Mortimer, and his lands, like those of Sir
Roland, have been seized by the crown. The child upstair