“Nay, my spurs are still to be won; for what was it to me whether I won them or not unless I might wear them as your true knight?  Sweetest mistress, these weary years have been strangely long and dark since the light of your presence has been withdrawn from us.  Now that the sun has risen once again upon Woodcrych, let it shine likewise upon Basildene.  Mistress Joan, I come to you with your father’s sanction.  You doubtless know how many years I have wooed you —­ how many years I have lived for you and for you alone.  I have waited even as the patriarch of old for his wife.  The time has now come when I have the right to approach you as a lover.  Sweet lady, tell me that you will reward my patience —­ that I shall not sue in vain.”

Peter Sanghurst bent the knee before her; but she was acute enough to detect the undercurrent of mockery in his tone.  He came as a professed suppliant; but he came with her father’s express sanction, and Joan had lived long enough to know how very helpless a daughter was if her father’s mind were once made up to give her hand in marriage.  Her safety in past days had been that Sir Hugh was not really resolved upon the point.  He had always been divided between the desire to conciliate the old sorcerer and the fear lest his professed gifts should prove but illusive; and when he was in this mood of uncertainty, Joan’s steady and resolute resistance had not been without effect.  But she knew that he owed large sums of money to the Sanghursts, who had made frequent advances when he had been in difficulties, and it was likely enough that the day of reckoning had now come, and that her hand was to be the price of the cancelled bonds.

Her father had for some days been dropping hints that had raised uneasiness in her mind.  This sudden appearance of Peter Sanghurst, coupled with his confident words, showed to Joan only too well how matters stood.

For a moment she stood silent, battling with her fierce loathing and disgust, her fingers toying with the gold circlet her lover had placed upon her finger.  The very thought of Raymond steadied her nerves, and gave her calmness and courage.  She knew that she was in a sore strait; but hers was a spirit to rise rather than sink before peril and adversity.

“Master Peter Sanghurst,” she answered, calmly and steadily, “I thought that I had given you answer before, when you honoured me by your suit.  My heart is not mine to give, and if it were it could never be yours.  I pray you take that answer and be gone.  From my lips you can never have any other.”

A fierce gleam was in his eye, but his voice was still smooth and bland.

“Sweet lady,” he said, “it irks me sore to give you pain; but I have yet another message for you.  Think you that I should have dared to come with this offer of my heart and hand if I had not known that he to whom thy heart is pledged lies stiff and cold in the grip of death —­ nay, has long since mouldered to ashes in the grave?”