Udal grinned at him, and licked his lips. The printer snarled: 'Know'st thou not, young ass, that this man was thrown out of his mastership at Eton for his foul living?' Udal was suddenly on his feet with the long pasty-knife held back among the furs of his gown. 'Ignoble ...' he began, but he lost his words in his trembling rage. The printer snatched at his long measuring stick. 'Down knife,' he grunted, for his fury, too, made his throat catch. 'Have a care, nunkey,' the young man laughed at the pair of them. 'They teach knife-thrusts in his Italian books.' 'I will have thy printer's licence revoked, ignoble man,' the magister said, grinning hideously. 'Thou, a Lutheran, to turn upon me who was undone by Papist lies! They said I lived foully; they said I stole the silver cellars....' He turned upon the old man, stretching out the hand that held the knife in a passionate gesture: 'Your Papists said that,' he appealed. 'But not a one of them believed it, though you dub me Lutheran.... See you, do I not govern now the chief Papist of you all? Would that be if they believed me filthy in my living. Have I not governed in the house of the Howards, the lord of it being absent? Would that have been if they had believed it of me?... And then....' He turned again upon the printer. 'For the sake of your men ... for the sake of the New Learning, which God prosper, I was cast down.' The printer grunted surlily: ''Tis known no wench is safe from thy amorousness. How many husbands have broken thy pate?' The magister threw the knife on to the table and rose, frostily rustling in his gown. 'I shall bring thee down, ignoble man,' he said. 'If thou hast the power to do that,' the old man asked suddenly, 'wherefore canst not get me redress in the matter of my wall?' The magister answered angrily: 'Privy Seal hath swallowed thy land: he shall not disgorge. But this man he shall swallow. Know you not that you may make a jack swallow, but no man shall make him give back; I, nor thou, nor the devil's self?' 'Oh, a God's name bring not Flail Crummock into this household,' the young man cut in. 'Would you undo us all?' 'Ignoble, ignoble, to twit a man with that Eton villainy,' the magister answered. 'A God's name bring not Privy Seal into the quarrel,' the young man repeated. 'None of us of the Old Faith believe that lie.' 'Keep thy tongue off Cromwell's name, young fool,' his grandfather said. 'We know not what walls have ears.' The young man went pale: the printer himself went pale, remembering suddenly that the magister was a spy of Cromwell's; all three of them had their eyes upon Udal; only the old man, with his carelessness of his great age, grinned with curiosity as if the matter were a play that did not concern him. The magister was making for the door with the books beneath his arm and a torturing smile round his lips. The boy, with a deep oath, ran out after him, a scarlet flash in the darkening room.