As they had greeted Sir Jeoffry with a shout of welcome, so they greeted the young newcomer, but in his reception there was more enthusiasm and laughter, as if there were some special cause for gayety in the mere sight of him.

When he drew up in their midst their voices broke forth into a tumult of noisy, frolicsome greeting, to which the lad gave back impudent, laughing answer.  In a moment’s time he was the centre figure of interest among them, and seemed to dominate them all as if he had been some young potentate instead of a mere handsome lad of twelve.

“If they were a band of barbarians and he their boy chief they could pay him no more court nor joy in him more,” Roxholm reflected.  “Is it his beauty or—­what means it?”

He could not withdraw his eyes from the boy, who sat his fretting hunter among them, sometimes scarcely able to restrain the animal’s fiery temper or keep him from lashing out his heels orbiting at the beasts nearest to him.  Now he trotted from one man to the other as the group scattered somewhat; now he sat half turned back, his hand on his steed’s hind quarters, flinging words and laughter to the outside man.

“Thou’lt have to use scissors again on thy periwig, ecod!” one man cried, banteringly.

“Damme, yes,” the youngster rapped out, and he caught a rich lock of his hair and drew it forward to look at it, frowning.  “What’s a man to do when his hair grows like a girl’s?”

The answer was greeted with a shout of laughter, and the boy burst forth with a laugh likewise, showing two rows of ivory teeth.  Somehow there was an imperial deviltry about him, an impudent wild spirit which had plainly made him conqueror, favourite, and plaything of the whole disreputable crew.

Men were not fastidious talkers in those times; the cleanest mouthed of them giving themselves plenty of license when they were in spirits.  Roxholm had heard broad talk enough at the University, where the young gentlemen indulged in conversation no more restrained than was that of their elders and betters; he had heard the jokes and profanity of both camp and Court since he had left Oxford, and had learned that squeamishness was far from being the fashion.  But never had he heard such oath-sprinkled talk or such open obscenity of joking as fell upon his ears this morning in but a brief space.  Hearing it in spite of himself, his blood grew hot and his horse began to paw the earth, he, in his irritation, having unknowingly fretted its mouth.  And then one of the company, an elderly sportsman with a watery eye, began a story.

“Good God!” Roxholm broke forth to the man nearest to him, one not of the party, but evidently one who found it diverting; “good God!  Can they not restrain themselves before a child?  Let them be decent for his mere youth’s sake!  The lad is not thirteen.”

The man started and stared at him a moment with open mouth, and then burst into a loud guffaw of laughter.