“It would go vastly better,” cried he, “I should breathe with infinite more ease, my sweet nurse, and forget that I had ever had a gaping hole to burn the side of me, could you but tell me that there had been even a trifle of sickness at the house beyond. Come, my sword was red, you know! It was not red for nothing! Was not Master Leech sent for in haste to draw more blood? The excellent physician, thou mindest, who helped thy worthy father so pleasantly from this world.” She would have drawn from him in soft sorrow and shame, for she understood now, but that his weak fingers plucked her back. Truly there seemed to be a devil in his eyes. Yet she was too tender of him not to humor him, as the mother her spoiled child. “Hast heard, Mall, of aught amiss at the castle?” quoth she, turning her head to address the old woman at the fire. “There was a gentleman out hunting with the Lady Julia o’ Thursday,” answered the crone, “as carried his arm in a sling, I heard tell; though he rode with the best of them.” “Faugh!” Lord Blantyre loosed Pomona’s tress and lay back sullenly. He drank the cup when she held it to his lips, in the same sullen silence; but when she shook his pillows and smoothed his sheet and cooed to him in the dear voice of his dream: “Now, sleep,” he murmured, complainingly: “Not if you leave me!” Pomona’s heart gave a great leap, and a rose flush grew on her face, lovelier than ever sunrise or fireglow had called there. “I will not leave you, my lord,” she replied. Her voice filled the whole room with deep harmony. He woke in the gray dawn, and there sat Pomona, her eyes dreaming, her hands clasped, her face a little stern in its serene, patient weariness. He cried to her sharply, because of the sharpness with which his heart smote him: “Hast sat thus the whole night long?” “Surely!” said she. “Well, to bed with you, then,” he bade her, impatiently. “Nay, I want nought. Send one of your wenches to my bell, some Sue or Pattie, so it be a young one. And you--to bed, to bed!” But she would not leave him till she had tested how it stood with him, according to her simple skill. As her hand rested on his brow, “Why Pomona?” queried he. “My lord?” “Pomona. ’Tis a marvelous fine name, and marvelous fitting to a nymph of the orchard. Pomona!” “Indeed,” she answered him, in her grave way, “Sue or Pattie would better become me. But my mother was book-learned, sir, and town-bred, and had her fancies. She sat much in the orchard the spring that I was born.” “Ay,” he mused. “So thy mother was book-learned and fanciful!” Then briskly he asked her: “Wouldst thou not like to know my name, Pomona? Unless, indeed, you know it already?” She shook her head. “Why, what a woman are you! In spite of apples, no daughter of Eve at all?” She still shook her head, and, smiling faintly, “To me it could make no difference,” she said. “Well, now you shall know,” he said, “and take it to your maiden dreams. I am Rupert, Earl of Blantyre.”