'I am thinking often, Mary, of your return to this country. Will it never come to pass? You told me in your letter in which you gave me those particulars of Sir Philip's death, that I should scarce believe that Ambrose was the child I knew at the old home of Ford Place. And scarce will you believe, when we meet, as meet I pray we shall, I am the same Lucy of days past. Ever since that time of your grief and sickness, I have changed. I look back with something which is akin to pity on the vain child who thought fine clothes and array the likest to enhance the fair face and form which maybe God has given me. Ay, Mary, I have learned better now. I should have been a dullard, in sooth, had I not learned much in the companionship graciously granted me by my honoured mistress. To be near her is an education, and she has been pleased in many ways to instruct me, not only in the needlecraft and tapestry work in which she excels, but also in opening for me the gates of knowledge, and in rehearsing in my ear the beautiful words of Scripture, and the Psalms in verse, as well as the poems of Mr Spenser, and, chiefest of all, of those works in prose and verse which Sir Philip has left behind. Sure, these will never die, and will tell those who come after us what we possessed and lost! 'Yet, after all, as my mistress saith again and yet again, it was not by all his deeds of valour and his gifts of learning that he stands so high forever amongst men. No, nor not by his death and the selfless act which men are speaking of on all sides, as he lay in the first agony of his sore wound on the battlefield of Zutphen. Not by these only will his name live, but by his life, which, for purity and faith, virtue and godliness, loyalty and truth, may be said to be without peer in this age of which he was so fair an ornament. 'I dare not say more, lest even you charge me with rhapsody. 'I rest, dear Mary, in all loving and tender affection, your sister, LUCY FORRESTER. 'To my honoured sister, Mary Gifford, at the house of Master Gifford, in Arnhem, February 1586. From Penshurst Place, in the county of Kent.' CHAPTER XVI FOUR YEARS LATER--1590 'My true love hath my heart and I have his, By just exchange, one for the other given. I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a better bargain driven. His heart in me keeps me and him in one, My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides; He loves my heart, for once it was his own, I cherish his, because in me it bides.' The sound of these words by Sir Philip Sidney, sung in a sweet melodious voice, was borne upon the summer air of a fair June evening in the year 1590.