’We have gotten a mighty grave man here with us, who came to our house last night at e’en. We wanted to send word to the castle to Sir Thomas; but the man said that he had had enough of the Kennedies to last him his lifetime, and that he would put up with us, if we could make shift to give him a bed. He is a man of a majestic and noble countenance, and when he had come within, he took a Bible from his wallet, and tairged us tightly on the histories of the wars of the Jews and on points of doctrine.’ ’Ye would be fit for that,’ said I to her, laughing, ’for most of our discourse has been upon points of doctrine and practice—though I mind not that we touched upon the wars of the Jews. We had ever wars enough of our own. Was it not so, sweet Kate?’ And I would have taken her by the waist, for that is ever the way, as I have just been reading in my song-book, to punish a woman, when like a pretty scold, she slanders her love. So, as the London stage catch hath it, I forgave her for it. Yet for all she would by no means permit me to come near her—which I was mortally sorry for. Because though I wanted her to change, I desired her not to change so mightily as all that. ’Na, na,’ she said, ’and that’s by with. Kate Allison needs no general lovers. Wear you your own lady’s favours; I can get them that loe me and none other, to wear mine.’ I pursued the subject no further at that time, meaning, however, to return to it. For a man likes not to see the things which have been freely his slipping from him like corn through a wide-meshed riddle. It makes his mind linger after things long past, and he begins to think them sweeter than any favours that ever he had, even when all the garden was most fully his to wander in and cull at his lordly pleasure. Too soon for my liking, therefore, we came to the door of the Grieve’s house, which was but a wide kitchen with two smaller rooms off it. I heard a voice uplifted as it seemed in prayer, and I bethought me with shame of my so late mean and earthly thoughts; but I looked at Kate Allison, and she was so pleasant to look upon that I found excuses for myself. Then the prayer being done we went in, and they told the man in the inner room that that same Launcelot Kennedy, for whom he had inquired, was come.