It was now more than an hour past midnight, so that it was with no little surprise we beheld, through the ill-closed hangings of the windows, the great hall bright with candles and fire. As he lifted me, now well-nigh crippled with fatigue, from the saddle, I prayed Ned to enter quickly and engage whom he should find for a moment in talk, while I slipped quietly by to the refuge of my chamber. In the morning I had trifled with the fancy that it were better to be born a man; now I knew it was best of all to be a woman; and thus I had no mind, while I could still by some sense of lingering contact mark the places where my lover's kisses had fallen, to be seen in the garb I wore by any man or woman whatsoever. And Ned, acting most comfortably in accordance with my desire, I was soon fast in the haven of my room, of whose door I did that night but once again draw the bolt; and even then I do think it was rather from desire of the food and the posset that she carried, than from any need of her company, that I admitted Prudence; and of the torrent of questions with which my ears were assailed as she tenderly waited on me, I answered few and heeded none. I would have been alone to think of Ned, and of the change of so strange a sweetness that I now began to discover in myself. I was indeed in that temper of mind wherein a maid will find even the object of her thought a hindrance to the right management of her thinking; and so I got very quickly to bed, feigning sleep to escape little Prue's chatter, the while I hugged to my breast the memories of the journey homeward; cherishing the sweetest fragments for a perpetual possession. But feigning passed very soon into reality, and the last I recall of that night is my dreamy watching of Prudence, as she busied herself, with a bearing of no little pique, in hanging out poor Rupert's clothes before the great fire, and muttering dark sayings of the folk that had secrets, and how, if that were the way of it, she could, nay, would, keep her own to herself. CHAPTER XVII