“Hast heard of aught, Timothy, touching the private matter that I unfolded yesterday?” Cornelius put on as careless an aspect as the disquietude of his brow could needs carry, but the inquiry was evidently one of no ordinary interest.  He twisted the points of his doublet, tied and untied the silk cords from his ruff, waiting Dodge’s answer in a posture not much belying the anxiety he wished to conceal.

“Why, master, an’ it were of woman’s humours, the old seer himself could not unriddle their pranks.”

Cornelius sighed, making the following hasty reply:—­

“Thinkest thou this same seer could not give me a lift from out my trouble?”

“This same seer, I wot,” replied Dodge, “is sore perplexed:  some evil and mischievous aspect doth afflict the horoscope of the nation—­Mars being conjunct with Venus and the Dragon’s tail.  Now, look to it, master, it is no light matter that will move him; but almost or ere I showed him the first glimpse of the business he waxed furious, and said that he cared not if all the unwed hussies in Christendom were hung up in a row, like rats on a string.”

“It is Kate’s birthday,” answered the merchant, “to-night being the feast of St Bartlemy; but, as thou knowest well, the astrologer that cast her figure gave no hope of her amendment should this day pass and never a husband.  Who would yoke with a colt untamed?  O Timothy! it were well nigh to make an old man weep.  I am a withered trunk.  Better had I been childless than have this proud wench to trouble mine house.”

The old man here wept, and it was a grievous thing to see his wrinkled cheeks become, as it were, but the sluices and channels of his tears.  Timothy, too, was something moved from his common posture; and once he endeavoured to turn, as though he would hide his face from his master’s trouble.

He sought to speak, but an evil and husky sort of humour settled in his throat, and he waited silently the subsiding of the sorrow he could not quell.

Cornelius raised his head:  a sudden thought seemed to animate him.  A ray had penetrated the gloomy envelope of his mind; and he peered through the casement intently eyeing the cool atmosphere.

“I’ll visit the cunning man myself, Timothy.  If he hear me not, then can I but return, weeping as I went.”  And with this speech he hastily departed.

Now on this, the morrow of St Bartlemy, it so happened that Kate also arose before the usual hour, and in a mood even more than ordinarily strange and untoward.  Her maiden was like to find it a task of no slight enterprise, the attempt to adorn Kate’s pretty person.  Not a garment would fit.  She threw the whole furniture of her clothes-press on a heap, and stamped on them for very rage.  She looked hideous in her brown Venice waistcoat; frightful in her orange tiffany farthingale;—­absolutely unbearable in her black velvet hood, wire ruff, and taffety gown.  So that in the end she was nigh going to bed again in the sulks, had not a jacket of crimson satin, with slashed bodice, embroidered in gold twist, taken her fancy.  Her little steel mirror, not always the object of such complacency, did for once reflect a beam of good humour, which so bewitched Kate that for the next five minutes she found herself settling into the best possible temper in the world.