"Has he a wife?" demanded Lady Margery rather slily.
"Nay, for that he came hither," said her husband, laughing complacently.
"Dear heart, but Doll is o'er young to be wed yet—think you not so, my Lord?" responded she, with an affectation of innocent simplicity.
"Doll!" cried Lord Marnell. "Gramercy, what would the woman be at? Doll! she is but a babe in the cradle. 'Tis Annis he would have—where be thine eyes, Madge?"
Lady Margery's laugh revealed her joke.
"Oh! good heart, thou wert but a-mocking, I see.—Well, my maid, how likest the matter?" And he turned to Agnes.
He expected to see a blush, a smile, and to hear a few faltered words of satisfaction with his arrangement. But no one of them answered him. Instead of these, what he did hear was perhaps the last speech he ever expected from the lips of Agnes Marston.
"Good my Lord, I thank you for your care. But if it may stand with your pleasure, pray you, give me leave to be a nun."
"A what!" came in accents of astonished dismay from her father, and the expression of satisfaction died out of his face in an instant.
"Annis!" exclaimed her stepmother.