"I do, when I have told you. Above an hundred and twenty pound, Master Matthew. That should your bravery cost you, in broidering-maids alone." "Well! what matter, so I had it?" "It might serve you. I should desire to buy more happiness with such a sum than could be stitched into golden broidery and seed-pearl." "Now come, Norman, let us hear thy notion of happiness. If thou hadst in thine hand an hundred pound, what should'st do withal?" "I would see if I could not dry up as many widows' tears as I had golden pieces, and bring as many smiles to the lips of orphans as they should divide into silver." "Prithee, what good should that do thee?" "It should keep mine heart warm in the chillest winter thereafter. But I thought rather of the good it should do them than me." "But what be such like folks to thee?" "Our Lord died for them, and He is something to me." "Fate meant thee for a monk, Hylton. Thou rannest thine head against the wall to become a squire." "Be monks the sole men that love God?" "They be the sole men that hold such talk." "I have known monks that held full different talk, I do ensure you. And I have known laymen that loved God as well as any monk that ever paced cloister." "Gramercy! do leave preaching of sermons. I have enow of them from my Lady my mother. Let's be jolly, if we can." "You should have the better right to be jolly, to know whither you were going, and that you should surely come out safe at the far end." "Happy man be my dole! I'm no wise feared. I'll give an hundred pound to the Church the week afore I die, and that shall buy me a soft-cushioned seat in Heaven, I'll warrant." "Who told you so much? Any that had been there?" "Man alive! wilt hold thy peace, and let man be? Thou art turned now into a predicant friar. I'll leave thee here to preach to the gilly-flowers." And Matthew walked off, with a sprig of mint in his mouth. He was not a bad man, as men go. He was simply a man who wanted to please himself, and to be comfortable and easy. In his eyes the whole fabric of the universe revolved round Matthew Foljambe. He did not show it as the royal savage did, who beat a primitive gong in token that, as he had sat down to dinner, the rest of the world might lawfully satisfy their hunger; but the sentiment in Matthew's mind was a civilised and refined form of the same idea. If he were comfortable, what did it signify if everybody else were uncomfortable?