"Be content, sweetheart," he would answer. "You are like a yearling colt--nay, 't is filly I mean. How dost spell that same word _filly_ now, Mistress Scholar? With the 'P' and the 'h' it should be, in the Grecian manner. But indeed you will overtake my growth soon enough. When I did first know you, my age to yours was as two to one and more. When I have done with Oxford, it will be but as four to three, and thou older for a woman than I for a man." "Tell me, then," I said to him one day, after some such talk, "when, last summer, you were at the Court with madam your mother, and I saw you not at all, did you not see many fine ladies and women of great beauty?" "Ay, many," quoth he, "but none such as you will be. Do but give the colt time." And when he was gone I would marvel why I cared for the beauty I had not. And since I found no clear answer to the question in my own mind, and ventured to seek it from no other, it was well, maybe, that Ned's long absence at Oxford and in London with the Lady Mary, extending as it did over the better part of four years, put the matter in time clean out of my head. Indeed, even in our quiet corner, we had other matter to consider in those days than the vanity of a half-grown maid. Now it is only in later times that I have come even to the most partial understanding of the many twists and turns in the fate of our perturbed island, that were then succeeding each other with so bewildering rapidity. This is no public history, or my ignorance would make of it a worse book yet than it promises, and I shall but recall the memory of those unquiet events that affected at this time our quiet life.