"My life is yours, sir," said he, with a blunt heartiness; and, taking my hand very firmly and tenderly in his, he added: "and Your Highness will now have from me two services in one."
And here Simon Emmet, who, upon a word of his master, had been for some minutes mighty full of a kind of bustling greatness, did give into Sir Michael's hands that great silver drinking bowl that no lip for over forty years had touched. And Sir Michael held the bowl high, and gave it then into the hands of the Prince of Orange.
"From this cup," said my father, "the last to drink was Your Highness's grandfather, King Charles the Martyr."
"Then in his name, and in the name of England, I drink first of a loving-cup," cried the Prince; which when he had done he passed the vessel to me, and from me it went the round of every living soul there present, leaving, I suppose, in the bottom of the bowl but a few drops of wine to wet the lips of Prudence, who, as luck would have it, came last of all in the drinking; for, after she had tipped it high to catch the last, she gazed beseechingly around, daintily licking her lips the while, as if she would know whether she might truly say she had drunk that toast. His Highness, marking with the rest her pretty gesture, could not forbear smiling.
"Ah, my pretty maid," he said, "it was you that did bring us that fat rooster in the nick of time. Do you then ask no reward?"
And Prue, as a woman can, asked of me in two movements of her eyes a question. Once most indicatively they went to His Highness's belt and sword, and once, with interrogation as plain, to my face, catching thence the answer before one man in the room, I truly think, had fully gathered the sense of the Prince's question.
"There is a thing, if it please Your Mightiness," she said, "that I would have."
"What is it, then?" said His Highness. "For it seems I must spend this day in giving."
"The fragments, Your Honor," says Prue, "of that same blessed sword."
And he gave her the broken pieces of the sword, which in triumph she straightway brought to me; and I hung them then and there above the hearth, standing upon the table most comfortably thrust into place by many willing hands.