Shelves all round the walls shone with pewter and copper dishes, cups, kettles, and vessels and implements of all household varieties, and ranged round the floor lay ploughshares, axes, and mattocks, all polished up. The ring of hammers on the anvil was heard in the court in the rear. The front of the hall was open for the most part, without windows, but it could be closed at night.
Breakfast was never a regular meal, and the household had partaken of it, so that there was no one in the hall excepting Master Hall, a stout, brawny, grizzled man, with a good-humoured face, and his son, more slim, but growing into his likeness, also a young notable-looking daughter-in-law with a swaddled baby tucked under her arm.
They seated Grisell at the table, and implored her to eat. The wheaten bread and the fowl were, it seemed, provided in her honour, and she could not but take her little knife from the sheath in her girdle, turn back her nun-like veil, and prepare to try to drive back her sobs, and swallow the milk of almonds pressed on her.
“Eh!” cried the daughter-in-law in amaze. “She’s only scarred after all.”
“Well, what else should she be, bless her poor heart?” said Mrs. Hall the elder.
“Why, wasn’t it thou thyself, good mother, that brought home word that they had the pig-faced lady at Wilton there?”
“Bless thee, Agnes, thou should’st know better than to lend an ear to all the idle tales thy poor old mother may hear at market or fair.”
“Then should we have enough to do,” muttered her husband.
“And as thou seest, ’tis a sweet little face, only cruelly marred by the evil hap.”
Poor Grisell was crimson at finding all eyes on her, an ordeal she had never undergone in the convent, and she hastily pulled forward her veil.