“I am undone by a woman’s wilfulness, by a woman’s headstrong resolve not to see.”
“You have naught to show me, Sir John.”
“Naught? Is all that I have said naught?”
“Words are not things; judgments are not facts. You say that he is so, and so and so. But when I ask you upon what facts you judge him, your only answer is that you think him to be what you say he is. Your thoughts may be honest, Sir John, but your logic is contemptible.” And she laughed again at his gaping discomfiture. “Come, now, deal like an honest upright judge, and tell me one act of his—one thing that he has ever done and of which you have sure knowledge—that will bear him out to be what you say he is. Now, Sir John!”
He looked up at her impatiently. Then, at last he smiled.
“Rogue!” he cried—and upon a distant day he was to bethink him of those words. “If ever he be brought to judgment I can desire him no better advocate than thou.”
Thereupon following up her advantage swiftly, she kissed him. “Nor could I desire him a more honest judge than you.”
What was the poor man to do thereafter? What he did. Live up to her pronouncement, and go forthwith to visit Sir Oliver and compose their quarrel.
The acknowledgment of his fault was handsomely made, and Sir Oliver received it in a spirit no less handsome. But when Sir John came to the matter of Mistress Rosamund he was, out of his sense of duty to her, less generous. He announced that since he could not bring himself to look upon Sir Oliver as a suitable husband for her, nothing that he had now said must mislead Sir Oliver into supposing him a consenting party to any such union.
“But that,” he added, “is not to say that I oppose it. I disapprove, but I stand aside. Until she is of full age her brother will refuse his sanction. After that, the matter will concern neither him nor myself.”