Old Badge pulled at his nose and grinned maliciously at the fire beside him.
'That is thy deliverer: that is thy flail of the monks,' he croaked at his son. The printer gazed moodily at the fire.
'Nay, it is but one of his servants,' he answered mechanically.
'And such servants go up and down this realm of England and ride us with iron bridles.' The old man laughed dryly and bitterly. 'His servant? See how we are held—we dare not shut our doors upon him since he is Cromwell's servant, yet if he come in he shall ruin us, take our money that we dare not refuse, deflower our virgins.... What then is left to us between this setter up of walls and his servants?'
The printer, fingering the T-square in his belt, said, slowly, 'I think this man loves too well that books should be printed in the Latin tongue to ruin any printer of them upon a private quarrel. Else I would get me across the seas.'
'He loves any wench much better,' the old man answered maliciously. 'Hearken!'
Through the wall there came a scuffling sound, thumps, and the noise of things falling. The wall there touched on the one that Cromwell had set up, so that there was bare room for a man to creep between.
'Body of God,' the printer said, 'is he eavesdropping now?'
'Nay, this is courtship,' the old man answered. His head leaned forward with a birdlike intentness; he listened with one hand held out as if to still any sound in the room. They heard footsteps from the floor above, a laugh and voices. 'Now Margot talks to him from her window.'
The printer had a motion of convulsed rage: