Presently comes Moll, all fresh and pink from the house, and falls to exclaiming upon the joy of sleeping betwixt clean sheets in a feather bed, and could speak of nothing else, saying she would give all the world to sleep so well every day of her life.

“Eh,” whispers her father in my ear, “you see how luxuries do tempt the poor child, and what kind of a bed she is like to lie in if our hopes miscarry.”

On which, still holding to my scruples, I says to Moll: 

“’Tis easy to say you would give the world, Moll, but I know full well you would give nothing for all the comfort possible that was not your own.”

“Nay,” says she, crossing her hands on her breast, and casting up her eyes with the look of a saint, “what are all the fruits of the earth to her who cannot take them with an easy conscience?  Honesty is dearer to me than the bread of life.”

Then, as Jack and I are looking at each other ruefully in the face at this dash to our knavish project, she bursts into a merry peal of laughter, like a set of Christmas bells chiming, whereupon we, turning about to find the cause of her merriment, she pulls another demure face, and, slowly lifting her skirt, shows us a white napkin tied about her waist, stuffed with a dozen delicacies she had filched from Don Sanchez’s table in coming down from her room.

CHAPTER IV.

Of the several parts that we are appointed to play.

Finding a sheltered secret corner, we made a very hasty breakfast of these stolen dainties, and since we had not the heart to restore them to our innkeeper, so we had not the face to chide Moll for her larceny, but made light of the business and ate with great content and some mirth.

A drizzly rain falling and turning the snow into slush, we kept under the shelter of the shed, and this giving us scope for the reflection Don Sanchez had counselled, my compunctions were greatly shaken by the consideration of our present position and the prospect of worse.  When I thought of our breakfast that Moll had stolen, and how willingly we would all have eaten a dinner got by the same means, I had to acknowledge that certainly we were all thieves at heart; and this conclusion, together with sitting all day doing nothing in the raw cold, did make the design of Don Sanchez seem much less heinous to me than it appeared the night before, when I was warm and not exceedingly sober, and indeed towards dusk I came to regard it as no bad thing at all.

About six comes back our Don on a fine horse, and receives our salutations with a cool nod—­we standing there of a row, looking our sweetest, like hungry dogs in expectation of a bone.  Then in he goes to the house without a word, and now my worst fear was that he had thought better of his offer and would abandon it.  So there we hang about the best part of an hour, now thinking the Don would presently send for us, and then growing to despair of everything but to be left in the cold forgotten; but in the end comes Master Landlord to tell us his worship in the Cherry room would see us.  So, after the same formalities of cleansing ourselves as the night afore, upstairs we go at the heels of a drawer, carrying a roast pig, which to our senses was more delightful than any bunch of flowers.