“My father!” cried the boy, as if the words had struck him. “Alack,” he added despairingly, “this sudden departure, upon which you have resolved, has thwarted all my plans. Yet, madam, you are wrong; my father does know. I have writ him all my heart.” Diana turned the pale, fresh beauty of her face full in surprise upon the speaker. “Aye—have you, indeed?” cried she. “And what says his lordship?” The youth, emboldened afresh, pressed forward; but she kept him sweetly at arm’s length, menacing him with her posy. “He has not answered yet—could not have answered yet, madam. Natheless, I am his only child; he loves me: there can be but one answer. Diana, if that be all that stands between us—” “Nay,” she teased, “and shall I tell you your father’s answer? ‘Ah, Harry’ (will his lordship say), ‘have I kept thee secluded in the country, that thou mightest grow strong in health and virtuous in mind’—for these, we are told, are my Lord Rockhurst’s reasons—‘and hast seen a young gentlewoman for the first time? Pack up, lad, pack and ride with me to London town; and in a week will’t have forgotten her very existence!’” “How little you know my father … how little you know me!” exclaimed the lover, with dignity. “Alas, child, this is country innocence. Do I not know something of the ways of the great world! Your education has not yet begun, all respect to his lordship’s judgment. When he has shown you the Court, the town, the quality—” Harry Rockhurst interrupted her with a vexed laugh:— “The Court, the town, the quality—why, madam, he will not even tell me of them. ’Tis only his duty as Captain of the King’s Yeomen and Constable of the Tower that keeps him from living here among us—the only life he deems worthy of a true gentleman: that of the owner on his estates. London, he says, is contamination. Therefore keepeth he me here, though it part him and me.” She smiled and shook her head:— “And how shall I find favour in the eyes of this strict gentleman?” she said, in the same fond tone of mockery. “I who am gay, and think not so ill of the town, and have no mind for sad faces and dull clothes! I fear me, Harry, your father is at heart a puritan!” “My lord a puritan,” cried the boy, in fine scorn—“the King’s own private friend in exile, the hero of Worcester’s evil day … why, Diana, villainous Noll set a higher price on my father’s head than upon any other in England, save his most gracious Majesty’s own—sweet Mistress Harcourt, if that were your only fear—” Greatly daring, he flung out his arm to encircle her. Swayed by his artless passion, Mistress Harcourt suffered the embrace, but it was with a kind of friendly tolerance. A loud shout from above drove them apart. “Cousin Di!—where can she be? Cousin Di, Master Rockhurst…!” There was Lionel Ratcliffe, on the terrace above them, shouting into space through the hollow of his hands; and beside him Edward Hare, consumed with laughter.