"And I love horses, sir," I answered, "and, indeed, many other things that my Lady Mary will ever say are not women's matters." Whereupon we laughed at Lady Mary a little, and the matter dropped, as he went to the muster. But I knew he felt in great need of a son that day, or he had never come so near throwing reproach on me that he loved so well for a fault that at another time he would not have had me change for a man's best virtue. Yet, as I gazed from the window at this threshing and winnowing of men, to make of them soldiers, the memory of that reproach rankled a little in me, and a small plot began to take form. At the time when I commenced housewife at home I had in a disused chamber above found a closet filled with clothes once worn by my half-brothers of the elder family that I had come into the world too late to know. These were the only relics, I believe, of three good and honest gentlemen that, in the strange and ghostly manner of a child as I then was, I reverenced much, and even contrived to love a little; I had therefore rescued many of these garments from the moth, and, deciding in my mind by the varying fashions and much guess-work to which brother the different pieces had belonged, bestowed them in three ordered piles in a wide shelf of my great oak press. "So these," I would say, as I brushed and folded them once a month, "were Henry's; these Maurice used to wear." And I always held that the morion and the back- and breast-pieces, which were all the armor found with the clothes, had belonged to Rupert. For they were wondrous small for a man, and I knew he had been the least of them all in stature, and had scarce attained his full growth when he fell at Salisbury. Now, in my excitement with the martial sounds without, and a good part, I doubt not, in mischief that meant going no further than gently avenging his slight of my sex upon my father, I suddenly thought of this wardrobe so little proper to a young maid's chamber; and at once began with trembling hands to choose from my store such garments as I thought would best become the son my father wished me, giving, I doubt not, an undue value to color and to that size which nearest approached my own, and little to coherence of fashion.