Thereafter, when they met William in the Market or upon the way, they glared at him with spiteful eyes and cursed him under their breath. But he, being quit of them and having gotten his revenge, smiled sweetly upon them in return and wished them ‘Good-day.’ Honest folk, seeing them go to the Abbey Church as before and nothing amend their ways, said it was a wonder that God did not make the carven images fall upon them and thus slay them in their hypocritical wickedness. III A few months afterwards, when the savour of the jest had become somewhat stale in the nostrils of the town, it happened that old Master Matthew, looking out of an upper chamber at the backside of the house early one morning, spied a certain maid washing out her smocks in a little green and private garden, and his mind was so perturbed at the view of her pretty cheeks, fair white arms and full bosom, that his evil old frame began to shake with desire from head to foot. He spied upon her secretly for some days, and then, unable to contain any longer, he went incontinently to her father (who was a poor man of the town) and obtained the girl in marriage, offering largely for her and buying her with money as though she had been a cow or a sheep instead of a Christian woman. When the news got about the town that old Master Matthew was minded to marry a young wench, great was the talk thereof. Some asked what an old wretch, who had enough to do with cordials and powders to keep the flicker of life in his withered carcass, could want with a wife. Others said that there was not heat enough in his heart to warm his own body in bed of a winter’s night, and that he had better be thinking of burying instead of marrying; others that he had been better minded to patch up his old soul for the next world than to meddle with womankind, with much more that was true of the same sort. Even his infamous companions in sin, the Apostles (or the Apostates as they might have been more rightly called), came and reasoned with him against his intention, saying that a young wife would be wanton, fickle, and wasteful, spending and squandering on rich garments for her back and rare dainties for her belly, and wasting in a few months what he had hardly gotten in so many years, and that she would make his life a Hell or at least a Purgatory so as to bundle him as quickly as might be into his grave, that she might enjoy his goods and fortune with a lusty young husband of her own choosing after his decease. But old men are violent and headstrong in their fancies, and Master Matthew in his sudden heat seemed to love the wench even more than his gold and silver, so that all their persuasions were of no effect.