"Go eat them, then," cried the girl; "and quickly. Say that you were but jesting." "And that you specially wished--" "No, father. Are you mad? Say what thou wilt, and canst; but mind this--Sir Mark must stay." Sir Thomas grumbled, but he had to go, and he went, and very easily persuaded Sir Mark to give up his project of leaving the Moat next day, and so it came about that about an hour later, when Mistress Anne was wandering, book in hand, in the pleasaunce, beneath the sun-pleached trees, where the soft turf was dappled with sunshine and shade, she accidentally came upon Sir Mark, moody and thoughtful, busy over his favourite occupation of trying to persuade one of the ancient carp in the moat to swallow a hook concealed in a lump of paste, a lure of which the said carp fought exceedingly shy. If Sir Mark had been told a month before that he would become an angler--one of those patient beings who go and seat themselves on the banks of a piece of water and wait till a fish chooses to touch their bait--he would have laughed them to scorn. All the same, though, he had gone to Sir Thomas Beckley's, very much shocked at the sudden termination of his matrimonial project, and had taken to his bed, where he stayed some days. He told himself that he was heart-broken; that he would never look upon woman's face again; that he would pay a pilgrimage yearly to Mace's grave, and live and die a heart-broken anchorite. On the sixth day he arose and wrote a despatch concerning the state of Jeremiah Cobbe's manufactures, retiring certain proposals that he had made concerning the supply of guns and powder to his Majesty's forces. Later on he found that it would not be necessary to seize on Captain Carr, and later still followed the news that Gil had left those parts. On the hearing of this he told himself that he could give full vent to his sorrow, which he did, taking at the same time a good deal of nutriment to counterbalance his sighs and tears. Then, being a satisfactory moping pursuit for one so cut to the heart, he took to fishing week after week for the carp in the great moat; and after, on this particular day, trying in vain for one particularly heavy monster, he sighed very loudly--so loudly that it seemed to be echoed, and, looking sadly up, his eyes fell upon Mistress Anne, reading as she walked beneath the trees. It was but a momentary glance, for she turned away directly after, and he sighed again, for he foresaw an interview with another lady as Dame Beckley came bustling to his side. It was one way of showing his grief: A curious way of showing it; but every one has his peculiarities, and Sir Mark elected to dress himself more gorgeously than of old.