Exhausted as I was by the excitement of sitting up and being moved, I knew little of what passed about me for the next two days, and remember less. I slept and ate, and sometimes awoke to wonder where I was. But the meals and the vague attempts at thought made scarcely more impression on my mind than the sleep. Yet all the while I was gaining strength rapidly, my youth and health standing me in good stead. The wound in my head, which had caused great loss of blood, healed all one way, as we say in Warwickshire; and about noon, on the second day after leaving Dort, I was well enough to reach the deck unassisted, and sit in the sunshine on a pile of rugs which Mistress Anne, my constant nurse, had laid for me in a corner sheltered from the wind. * * * * * Fortunately the weather was mild and warm, and the sunshine fell brightly on the wide river and the wider plain of pasture which stretched away on either side of the horizon, dotted, here and there only, by a windmill, a farmhouse, the steeple of a church, the brown sails of a barge, or at most broken by a low dike or a line of sand-dunes. All was open, free; all was largeness, space, and distance. I gazed astonished. The husband and wife, who were pacing the deck forward, came to me. He noticed the wondering looks I cast round. "This is new to you?" he said smiling. "Quite--quite new," I answered. "I never imagined anything so flat, and yet in its way so beautiful." "You do not know Lincolnshire?" "No." "Ah, that is my native county," he answered. "It is much like this. But you are better, and you can talk again. Now I and my wife have been discussing whether we shall tell you more about ourselves. And since there is no time like the present I may say that we have decided to trust you." "All in all or not at all," Mistress Bertram added brightly. I murmured my thanks. "Then, first to tell you who we are. For myself I am plain Richard Bertie of Lincolnshire, at your service. My wife is something more than appears from this, or"--with a smile--"from her present not too graceful dress. She is----" "Stop, Richard! This is not sufficiently formal," my lady cried prettily. "I have the honor to present to you, young gentleman," she went on, laughing merrily and making a very grand courtesy before me, "Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk." I made shift to get to my feet, and bowed respectfully, but she forced me to sit down again. "Enough of that," she said lightly, "until we go back to England. Here and for the future we are Master Bertram and his wife. And this young lady, my distant kinswoman, Anne Brandon, must pass as Mistress Anne. You wonder how we came to be straying in the streets alone and unattended when you found us?"