Sometimes the moonlight through the ragged clouds came in upon the floor, and in the hurry of the wind he almost fancied he could hear the Avon, bank-full, rushing under the old mill-bridge.

Then one day there came a shower with a warm south wind, sweet and healthful and serene; and through the shower, out of the breaking clouds, a sun-gleam like a path of gold straight down to the heart of London town; and on the south wind, down that path of gold, came April.

That night the wind in the chimney fluted a glad, new tune; and when Nick looked out at his casement the free stars danced before him in the sky.  And when he felt that fluting wind blow warm and cool together on his cheek, the chimneys mocked him, and the town was hideous.

* * * * *

It fell upon an April night, when the moon was at its full, that Master Carew had come to the Falcon Inn, on the Southwark side of the river, and had brought Nick with him for the air.  Master Heywood was along, and it was very pleasant there.

The night breeze smelled of green fields, and the inn was thronged with company.  The windows were bright, and the air was full of voices.  Tables had been brought out into the garden and set beneath the arbor toward the riverside.  The vines of the arbor were shooting forth their first pink-velvet leaves, and in the moonlight their shadows fell like lacework across the linen cloths, blurred by the glow of the lanterns hung upon the posts.

The folds in the linen marked the table-tops with squares like a checker-board, and Nick stood watching from the tap-room door, as if it were a game.  Not that he cared for any game; but that watching dulled the teeth of the hunger in his heart to be out of the town and back among the hills of Warwickshire, now that the spring was there.

“What, there!—­a pot of sack!” cried one gay fellow with a silver-bordered cloak.  “A pot of sack?” cried out another with a feather like a rose-bush in his cap; “two pots ye mean, my buck!” “Ods-fish my skin!” bawled out a third—­“ods-fish my skin!  Two pots of beggarly sack on a Saturday night and a moon like this?  Three pots, say I—­and make it malmsey, at my cost!  What, there, knave! the table full of pots—­I’ll pay the score.”

At that they all began to laugh and to slap one another on the back, and to pound with their fists upon the board until the pewter tankards hopped; and when the tapster’s knave came back they were singing at the top of their lungs, for the spring had gotten into their wits, and they were beside themselves with merriment.

Master Tom Heywood had a little table to himself off in a corner, and was writing busily upon a new play.  “A sheet a day,” said he, “doth do a wonder in a year”; so he was always at it.

Gaston Carew sat beyond, dicing with a silky rogue who had the coldest, hardest face that Nick had ever seen.  His eyes were black and beady as a rat’s, and were circled about by a myriad of little crowfoot lines; and his hooked nose lay across his thin blue lips like a finger across a slit in a dried pie.  His long, slim hands were white as any woman’s; and his fingers slipped among the laces at his cuffs like a weasel in a tangle-patch.