He nodded. "I know not yet how little man may need. I have lived in plenty."
At that moment her eyes rested on the Cloistered House.
"The Earl of Eglington would not call it plenty." A shade passed over David's face. "I know not how he would measure. Is his own field so wide?"
"The spread of a peacock's feather."
"What does thee know of him?" David asked the question absently.
"I have eyes to see, Davy." The shadows from that seeing were in her eyes as she spoke, but he did not observe them.
"Thee sees but with half an eye," she continued. "With both mine I have seen horses and carriages, and tall footmen, and wine and silver, and gilded furniture, and fine pictures, and rolls of new carpet—of Uncle Benn's best carpets, Davy—and a billiard-table, and much else."
A cloud slowly gathered over David's face, and he turned to her with an almost troubled surprise. "Thee has seen these things—and how?"
"One day—thee was in Devon—one of the women was taken ill. They sent for me because the woman asked it. She was a Papist; but she begged that I should go with her to the hospital, as there was no time to send to Heddington for a nurse. She had seen me once in the house of the toll- gate keeper. Ill as she was, I could have laughed, for, as we went in the Earl's carriage to the hospital-thirty miles it was—she said she felt at home with me, my dress being so like a nun's. It was then I saw the Cloistered House within and learned what was afoot."
"In the Earl's carriage indeed—and the Earl?"