"So, Mistress Corbet, I have not seen you for long," said she, drawing herself up; "but I am nobody now—only a poor old woman whom nobody cares for. I thought at first you were going to be like a daughter to me, but I see how it is."
"Now you discourage me," said I, feeling her reproach all the more that I deserved it. "I had come to ask a great favor, and now I am afraid."
"And what favor may that be?" she asked me, rather suspiciously, but yet relenting a little, as I thought.
"Even that you will teach me to knit," I answered. "My mistress says that you know how to knit hosen like those which come from Spain, and that you taught her mother."
"So I did, so I did," she answered; "and a sweet creature she was. How well I remember when my Lord Willowby came a suitor for her hand;" and therewith she went off in a long description of the wedding, and bedding, and so forth, which kept her amused till it was time for me to go.
"But you will teach me to knit?" said I, as I rose to leave her.
"That I will, that I will, dear maiden. I will hunt up my knitting-pins to-day, and will show you the motion, and how to put up the stitches. Just wheel my chair near to yonder cabinet, if you will, and I will see what I can find."
And so I left her happy in rummaging her drawers.
The next morning, she had found her pins, and gave me a lesson in knitting, over which we became quite good friends again. By degrees she opened her mind to me, and I found out what was the trouble which embittered her life. It seems that Queen Katherine, in her will, had provided that some one should make a pilgrimage to our Lady of Walsingham, for the benefit of her soul. This had never been done, and the poor, faithful old servant was eating her heart with grief lest her mistress was still suffering in Purgatory on account of this omission.
"I would gladly have gone myself," said she, "but I had a broken leg; and now there is no more any holy shrine at Walsingham. Oh, me! Oh, me! That my poor mistress, who would have gone on foot to Rome to save the soul of a poor beggar, should suffer for want of such a charity as that."