"Constant!" said I; and as I said the word I could feel the little tremor in my laughter which I hoped his ear would not detect. "Constant to what--to whom? Ah, there is doubtless some lady that looks out over the endless canals and ugly windmills of flat Holland for your return, Captain Royston." "Nay, nay," he answered, "there is no broad Dutch face wet with tears of my causing." And then the mirth died out of his voice, as with a very tender hesitancy he continued: "But there is, or there was, a little maid--a child--but, plague on me! what do I babble of? And what does so young a lad as you know of these things?" "H'm-m-m!" said I, as one that could, if he would but speak, lay claim to knowledge enough and to spare. "What, what!" he cried, mocking me. "Is your heart even as tender as your years? Does the baby think he knows what love is?" "On my conscience, yes," I answered; "but I may know and never feel it, I do suppose." "What an outlandish boy it is!" said Ned, laughing; and, more gravely, "when you love, lad, and would have your lady look upon you, be as when you served us so well this day, and not the child that is disordered by the chance word of a jolly soldier. I have heard tell that women do love one that is a man, be his vows, even as De Rondiniacque's, never so brittle." "Perhaps they do," I answered; and wondered, sickly a little in my heart, how it would fare with me if his were so. "But," I continued, "if men's vows are so light, what of that little maid?" And my gallant Captain seemed to retire, as it were, again into his shell, saying he would speak of her no more, and that indeed he knew not wherefore he had called her to mind. Whereto I said that maybe I could tell him. "'T is little likely," said he, smiling as one that suffers the gambols of a merry child, even to the peril of a wound but half healed. "But tell you I can," I persisted; "you spoke of her, not because she did come to your mind, but because she is never out of it. Is it not so?" Again he looked at me with that glance of enquiry. "Indeed, I think it is so," he replied; "but how you should know it, Master----, by my life, here have I had all manner of converse with you, even to the telling things that have not passed my lips this three years, and yet I know not your name. Prithee, tell it me." "My name is Drayton," I said. "Is it even so?" cried Ned. "It is strange. Where do you live?" "From here some five leagues on the great road, Salisbury way," I answered. "At Drayton Manor, is it?" he asked with great eagerness. "At Drayton Manor," I replied. "But old Sir Michael," says Ned, "had no son of your youth." "Nay," said I, "I am no son of Sir Michael. But he is my nearest of kin, and in his house do I live this many a day."