"Nay, my lord, craving your
pardon, but we are accustomed to have grace before meat," said Robin decorously.
"Climate, all climate." Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes's barn.
She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house at the back of Friars Pardon. The old man was not to be found, and she knocked at his half-opened door, for she needed him to fill her idle forenoon.
She watched the smokeless chimneys of Friars Pardon slash its roofs with shadow, and the smoke of Iggulden's last lighted fire gradually thin and cease.
Betts, small, black-eyed, and dark, was almost as unconcerned as Friars Pardon.
"Friars Pardon--Friars Pardon!" Sophie chanted rapturously, her dark gray eyes big with delight.
They suffered many things ere they returned across the fields in a fly one Saturday night, nursing a two by two-and-a-half box of deeds and maps--lawful owners of Friars Pardon and the five decayed farms therewith.
"I've bought Friars Pardon to prevent Sir Walter's birds straying."
All have forgiven me, some have even loved me; but I think that God has not
pardoned me, for the memory of that execution pursues me constantly and every night I see that woman's ghost rising before me."
"
Pardon me the last time, my affianced Raoul!" said she.
She cried, "She was undone, and that the reputation of her house, which was never blown upon before, was utterly destroyed." Then, turning to the men, she cried, "What, in the devil's name, is the reason of all this disturbance in the lady's room?" Fitzpatrick, hanging down his head, repeated, "That he had committed a mistake, for which he heartily asked
pardon," and then retired with his countryman.
I did but make a mistake between my right hand and my left; and he might have
pardoned a greater, who took a fool for his counsellor and guide.''