Like all men in his day--and a good many in our own--Matthew had a low opinion of woman. It had been instilled into him, as it was at that time into every man who wrote himself "esquire," that the utmost chivalrous reverence was due to the ladies as an abstract idea; but this abstract idea was quite compatible with the rudest behaviour and the supremest contempt for any given woman in the concrete. Woman was an article of which there were two qualities: the first-class thing was a toy, the second was a machine. Both were for the use of man--which was true enough, had they only realised that it meant for man's real help and improvement, bodily, mental, and spiritual; but they understood it to mean for the bodily comfort and mental amusement of the nobler half of the human race. The natural result of this was that every woman must be appropriated to some master. The bare notion of allowing a woman to choose whether she would go through life unattached to a master, or, if otherwise, to reject one she feared or disliked, would have seemed to Matthew the most preposterous audacity on the part of the inferior creature, as it would also have appeared if the inferior creature had shown discontent with the lot marked out for it. The inferior creature, on the whole, walked very meekly in the path thus swept for it. This was partly, no doubt, because it was so taught as a religious duty; but partly, also, because the style of education then given to women left no room for the mental wings to expand. The bird was supplied with good seed and fresh water, and the idea of its wanting anything else was regarded as absurd. Let it sit on the perch and sing in a properly subdued tone. That it was graciously allowed to sing was enough for any reasonable bird, and ought to call forth on its part overflowing gratitude. Even then, a few of the caged birds were not content to sit meekly on the perch, but they were eyed askance by the properly behaved ones, and held up to the unfledged nestlings as sorrowful examples of the pernicious habit of thinking for one's self. Never was bird less satisfied to be shut up in a cage than the hapless prisoner in that manor house, whom the peasants of the neighbourhood knew as the White Lady. Now and then they caught a glimpse of her at the window of her chamber, which she insisted on having open, and at which she would stand sometimes by the hour together, looking sorrowfully out on the blue sky and the green fields, wherein she might wander no more. A wild bird was Marguerite of Flanders, in whose veins ran the blood of those untamed sea-eagles, the Vikings of Denmark; and though bars and wires might keep her in the cage, to make her content with it was beyond their power. So thought Norman Hylton, looking up at the white figure visible behind the bars which crossed the casement of the captive's chamber. He knew little of her beyond her name.