The members of one of the Merchant Guilds were supping together in the great guest-room, and servants began to go to and fro across the yard with dishes from the kitchen. Mellis saw a big man with a face as round and as sallow as a cream cheese come out and speak to her brother. Gilbert glanced up at her, and then beckoned her to come down. She appeared in the yard, with her lute hanging from her shoulders by a cherry-colored ribbon. The man with the sallow face stared her over, and nodded his approval. “If her voice prove as good as her face, my guests will have no cause to grumble. I will hire the two of you for the evening, for a silver groat and your suppers.” Mellis had to suffer the insolence of the fat fellow’s eye. Her brother grimaced, and shook an empty gypsire. “We shall not die of a surfeit of wealth.” “Take it or leave it,” said the innkeeper roughly. “I have my choice of all the wastrels and wenches in Gawdy Town.” Mellis’s face showed white and cold. The beast’s churlishness roused such scorn in her that she soared above such a thing as anger. And so for two hours she stood in the guest-room of the “Painted Lady,” making music for men who over-ate and over-drank themselves, and who looked at her as none of them would have looked at their neighbors’ daughters or wives. Her scorn filled her with a kind of devilry. She sang to see what manner of swine these men were; sang to them as though each had the soul of a Dan Chaucer. And not a few of them grew very silent, and sat and stared at her with a brutish wonder. An oldish man sniveled and wept. Her brother Gilbert was kept busy scraping at the strings of his viol, and all the passage-ways were crowded with servants and scullions who crowded to listen. “That was famous, Kate,” he said to her as he saw her safe to the stairs, “I passed around the cap and drew five pence out of the worthies.” “I think I would sooner have sung to lost souls in Hell,” she answered him. In the attic she stripped off her spencer and gown, and lay down on one of the straw pallets in her shift. Her bed-fellows came up anon, three rollicking girls who smelt of the kitchen. Said one of them: “That brother of thine is a pretty fellow. I warrant I’d tramp to Jerusalem with such a brother.” They tittered, and squeaked like mice. Mellis sat up and looked at them by the glimmer of the rushlight. “My dears,” she said, “I am very weary. Let me sleep. One may have to sing when one’s heart is heavy.” And so she silenced them. They crept to bed as quietly as birds going to roost. _Chapter V_ Brother Martin said matins to the sparrows who had built their nests in the thatch of the chapel, and having drunk a cup of spring water and eaten a crust of bread, he set out early to try to lose himself in the Forest.