“With all my heart!” and Dennet produced the coin. “Oh! Stephen, are you sure he is safe? Thou bad Goldspot, to fly away from me! Wink with thine eye—thou saucy rogue! Wottest thou not but for Stephen they might be blinding thy sweet blue eyes with hot needles?” “His wing is grown since the moulting,” said Stephen. “It should be cut to hinder such mischances.” “Will you do it? I will hold him,” said Dennet. “Ah! ’tis pity, the beauteous green gold-bedropped wing—that no armour of thine can equal, Stephen, not even that for the little King of Scots. But shouldst not be so silly a bird, Goldie, even though thou hast thine excuse. There! Peck not, ill birdling. Know thy friends, Master Stare.” And with such pretty nonsense the two stood together, Dennet in her white cap, short crimson kirtle, little stiff collar, and white bib and apron, holding her bird upside down in one hand, and with the other trying to keep his angry beak from pecking Stephen, who, in his leathern coat and apron, grimed, as well as his crisp black hair, with soot, stood towering above her, stooping to hold out the lustrous wing with one hand while he used his smallest pair of shears with the other to clip the pen-feathers. “See there, Master Alderman,” cried Mistress Headley, bursting on him from the gallery stairs. “Be that what you call fitting for your daughter and your prentice, a beggar lad from the heath? I ever told you she would bring you to shame, thus left to herself. And now you see it.” [Illustration: “See there, Master Alderman”] Their heads had been near together over the starling, but at this objurgation they started apart, both crimson in the cheeks, and Dennet flew up to her father, bird in hand, crying, “O father, father! suffer her not. He did no wrong. He was cutting my bird’s wing.” “I suffer no one to insult my child in her own house,” said the alderman, so much provoked as to be determined to put an end to it all at once. “Stephen Birkenholt, come here.” Stephen came, cap in hand, red in the face, with a strange tumult in his heart, ready to plead guilty, though he had done nothing, but imagining at the moment that his feelings had been actions. “Stephen,” said the alderman, “thou art a true and worthy lad! Canst thou love my daughter?” “I—I crave your pardon, sir, there was no helping it,” stammered Stephen, not catching the tone of the strange interrogation, and expecting any amount of terrible consequences for his presumption. “Then thou wilt be a faithful spouse to her, and son to me? And Dennet, my daughter, hast thou any distaste to this youth—though he bring nought but skill and honesty?” “O, father, father! I—I had rather have him than any other!”