“Bab, I will not play me with yonder Lucrece. She tells lies, and is a thief.”
“Marry La’kin, my poor lamb!” sighed Barbara. “My mind sorely misgiveth me that I have brought thee into a den of thieves. Eh me, if the good Master had but lived a while longer! Of a truth, the Lord’s ways be passing strange.”
Clare had run off again to Margaret, and the last sentence was not spoken to her. But it was answered by somebody.
“Which of the Lord’s ways, Barbara Polwhele?”
“Sir?” exclaimed Barbara, looking up surprisedly into the grave, though kindly face of a tall, dark-haired man in clerical garb. “I was but—eh, but yon eyes! ’Tis never Master Robin?”
Mr Tremayne’s smile replied sufficiently that it was.
“And is yonder little Clare Avery?” he asked, with a tender inflection in his voice. “Walter’s child,—my brother Walter!”
“Ay, Master Robin, yon is Mistress Clare; and you being shepherd of this flock hereaway, I do adjure you, look well to this little lamb, for I am sore afeard she is here fallen amongst wolves.”
“I am not the Shepherd, good friend,—only one of the Shepherd’s herd-lads. But I will look to the lamb as He shall speed me. And which of the Lord’s ways is so strange unto thee, Barbara?”
“Why, to think that our dear, good Master should die but now, and leave the little lamb to be cast in all this peril.”