fits were over.

"Look you, my lady," she had ended, in her clear, rich girl-voice--and
to every word she uttered the mercer and his shopmen and boys had stood
listening behind their counters or hid round bales of goods, all
grinning as they listened--"I know all your secrets as I know the
secrets of other fine ladies. I know and laugh at them because they
show you to be such fools. They are but fine jokes to me. My morals do
not teach me to pray for you or blame you. Your tricks are your own
business, not another woman's, and I would have told none of them--not
one--if you had not lied about me. I am not a woman in two things: I
wear breeches and I know how to keep my mouth shut as well as if 'twere
padlocked; but you lied about me when you told the story of young
Lockett and me. 'Twas a damned lie, my lady. Had it been true none
would have known of it, and he must have been a finer man--with more
beauty and more wit. But as for the thing I tell you of Sir James--and
your meeting at----"

But here the fragile "Willow Wand" shrieked and fell into her first
fit, not having strength to support herself under the prospect of
hearing the story again with further and more special detail.

"I hear too much of her," Roxholm said to himself at last. "She is in
the air a man breathes, and seems to get into his veins and fly to his
brain." He suddenly laughed a short laugh, which even to himself had a
harsh sound. "'Tis time I should go back to Flanders," he said, "and
rejoin his Grace of Marlborough."

He had been striding over the hillsides all morning with his gun over
his shoulder, and had just before he spoke thrown himself down to rest.
He had gone out alone, his mood pleasing itself best with solitude, and
had lost his way and found himself crossing strange land. Being wearied
and somewhat out of sorts, he had flung himself down among the heather
and bracken, where he was well out of sight, and could lie and look up
at the gray of the sky, his hands clasped beneath his head.

"Yes, 'twill be as well that I go back to Flanders," he said again,
somewhat gloomily; and as he spoke he heard voices on the fall of the
hill below him, and glancing down through the gorse bushes, saw
approaching his resting-place four sportsmen who looked as fatigued as
himself.

He did not choose to move, thinking they would pass him, and as they
came nearer he recognised them one by one, having by this time been
long enough in the neighbourh