“Are you mad?” she cried. “And do you think to win me by slaying my father? Throw down that sword, Thomas.”
“As for winning you, it seems that there is small chance of it;” I answered hotly, “but I tell you this, not for the sake of all the maids upon the earth will I stand to be beaten with a stick like a scullion.”
“And there I do not blame you, lad,” said her father, more kindly. “I see that you also have courage which may serve you in good stead, and it was unworthy of me to call you ‘pill-box’ in my anger. Still, as I have said, the girl is not for you, so be gone and forget her as best you may, and if you value your life, never let me find you two kissing again. And know that to-morrow I will have a word with your father on this matter.”
“I will go since I must go,” I answered, “but, sir, I still hope to live to call your daughter wife. Lily, farewell till these storms are overpast.”
“Farewell, Thomas,” she said weeping. “Forget me not and I will never forget my oath to you.”
Then taking Lily by the arm her father led her away.
I also went away—sad, but not altogether ill-pleased. For now I knew that if I had won the father’s anger, I had also won the daughter’s unalterable love, and love lasts longer than wrath, and here or hereafter will win its way at length. When I had gone a little distance I remembered the Spaniard, who had been clean forgotten by me in all this love and war, and I turned to seek him and drag him to the stocks, the which I should have done with joy, and been glad to find some one on whom to wreak my wrongs. But when I came to the spot where I had left him, I found that fate had befriended him by the hand of a fool, for there was no Spaniard but only the village idiot, Billy Minns by name, who stood staring first at the tree to which the foreigner had been made fast, and then at a piece of silver in his hand.
“Where is the man who was tied here, Billy?” I asked.
“I know not, Master Thomas,” he answered in his Norfolk talk which I will not set down. “Half-way to wheresoever he was going I should say, measured by the pace at which he left when once I had set him upon his horse.”
“You set him on his horse, fool? How long was that ago?”