"
"You have a right to know it, if you have lost a brother's favor
through it. And yet----Ah well, you are, as I understand, a
clerk, so I must think of you as one step further in orders, and
make you my father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a
suitor for my hand, less as I think for my own sweet sake than
because he hath ambition and had it on his mind that he might
improve his fortunes by dipping into my father's strong
box--though the Virgin knows that he would have found little
enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, a gallant
knight and tried soldier of the oldest blood, to whom this man's
churlish birth and low descent----Oh, lackaday! I had forgot that
he was of the same strain as yourself."
"Nay, trouble not for that," said Alleyne, "we are all from good
mother Eve."
"Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and
some be foul," quoth she quickly. "But, to be brief over the
matter, my father would have none of his wooing, nor in sooth
would I. On that he swore a vow against us, and as he is known
to be a perilous man, with many outlaws and others at his back,
my father forbade that I should hawk or hunt in any part of the
wood to the north of the Christchurch road.
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