"I can see that something is the matter," she said sagely, with her head on one side, and that air of being the elder which she often assumed with me, though she was really the younger by two years. "Why did you not wait for the others? Why have you come home alone? Francis," [with sudden conviction] "you have vexed my father! That is it!"
"He has beaten me like a dog!" I blurted out passionately; "and before them all! Before those strangers he flogged me!"
She had her back to the window, and some faint gleam of wintry sunshine, passing through the gules of the shield blazoned behind her, cast a red stain on her dark hair and shapely head. She was silent, probably through pity or consternation; but I could not see her face, and misread her. I thought her hard, and, resenting this, bragged on with a lad's empty violence.
"He did; but I will not stand it! I give you warning, I won't stand it, Petronilla!" and I stamped, young bully that I was, until the dust sprang out of the boards, and the hounds by the distant hearth jumped up and whined. "No! not for all the base bishops in England!" I continued, taking a step this way and that. "He had better not do it again! If he does, I tell you it will be the worse for some one!"
"Francis," she exclaimed abruptly, "you must not speak in that way!"
But I was too angry to be silenced, though instinctively I changed my ground.
"Stephen Gardiner!" I cried furiously. "Who is Stephen Gardiner, I should like to know? He has no right to call himself Gardiner at all! Dr. Stephens he used to call himself, I have heard. A child with no name but his godfather's; that is what he is, for all his airs and his bishopric! Who is he to look on and see a Cludde beaten? If my uncle does not take care----"
"Francis!" she cried again, cutting me short ruthlessly. "Be silent, sir!" [and this time I was silent], "You unmanly boy," she continued, her face glowing with indignation, "to threaten my father before my face! How dare you, sir? How dare you? And who are you, you poor child," she exclaimed, with a startling change from invective to sarcasm--"who are you to talk of bishops, I should like to know?"
"One," I said sullenly, "who thinks less of cardinals and bishops than some folk, Mistress Petronilla!"
"Ay, I know," she retorted scathingly--"I know that you are a kind of half-hearted Protestant--neither fish, flesh, nor fowl!"