Agnes did not quite like such a home question. Yet she replied calmly, without any idea of the other question which was coming.
“Methinks, no; not if I truly loved him.”
“And couldst thou truly love—me, Agnes?”
For an instant Agnes gave no answer. She had as little expected to have that question asked her as she had expected to be created a duchess.
“Say sooth, if thou shouldst be feared,” said John Laurence; and the faint suspicion of pain in his tone unloosed her lips at once.
Afraid! Afraid to leave all her dreary past behind her, and to begin a new life, with her cup of gladness full to the very brim? John Laurence was satisfied with his answer. But, for the first time, not one word of reading or comment reached Agnes’s mind in an intelligible form.
“May be, my gracious Lady, your good Ladyship should like your palfrey called!” were the words that greeted Agnes when she made her reappearance in Mistress Winter’s kitchen, having certainly been more forgetful than usual of the flight of time. “Or, may be, it might please your honourableness to turn your goodly eyes upon the clock, and behold whether it be meet time for a decent maid to come home of a feast-day even? By my troth, I would wager thou hadst been to Westminster and hadst danced a galliardo in the Queen’s Grace’s hall, did I not know that none with ’s eyes in ’s head should e’er so much as look on thee. Thou idle doltish gadabout! Dost think I keep thee in board and lodgment and raiment for to go a-gossiping with every idle companion thou mayest meet? Whither hast been, thou dawdlesome patch? Up to no good, I warrant thee!”
“I have been to Paul’s, Mistress, an’ it like you,” was all that Agnes answered.
“Soothly, it liketh me well, sweeting! Alisting some fat pickpurse friar, with his oily words, belike?”
“I have been a-talking with a friend,” said Agnes boldly.