"'Tis ill treatment for a gentleman who wants an heir," the old woman answered, as disrespectful of his spouse as he was, being a time-serving crone, and knowing that it paid but poorly to coddle women who did not as their husbands would have them in the way of offspring. "It should have been a fine boy, but it is not, and my lady—"

"Damn her puling tricks!" said Sir Jeoffry again, pulling at his horse's bit until the beast reared.

"She would not let me rest until I came to you," said the nurse resentfully. "She would have you told that she felt strangely, and before you went forth would have a word with you."

"I cannot come, and am not in the mood for it if I could," was his answer. "What folly does she give way to? This is the ninth time she hath felt strangely, and I have felt as squeamish as she—but nine is more than I have patience for."

"She is light-headed, mayhap," said the nurse. "She lieth huddled in a heap, staring and muttering, and she would leave me no peace till I promised to say to you, 'For the sake of poor little Daphne, whom you will sure remember.' She pinched my hand and said it again and again."

Sir Jeoffry dragged at his horse's mouth and swore again.

"She was fifteen then, and had not given me nine yellow-faced wenches," he said. "Tell her I had gone a-hunting and you were too late;" and he struck his big black beast with the whip, and it bounded away with him, hounds and huntsmen and fellow-roysterers galloping after, his guests, who had caught at the reason of his wrath, grinning as they rode.

*

In a huge chamber hung with tattered tapestries and barely set forth with cumbersome pieces of furnishing, my lady lay in a gloomy, canopied bed, with her new-born child at her side, but not looking at or touching it, seeming rather to have withdrawn herself from the pillow on which it lay in its swaddling-clothes.