173 MASTER SKYLARK

English but chance travelers, and even the loudest shouting
could not serve to make the people understand.

While he spun these wondrous yarns Nick would curl
up on the hearth and blow the crackling fire, sometimes
staring at the master-player’s stories, sometimes laughing
to himself at the funny faces carved upon the sides of the
chubby Dutch bellows, and sometimes neither laughing
nor listening, but thinking silently of home. Then Carew,
looking at him there, would quickly turn his face away
and tell another tale.

But oftener the master-player stayed all night at the
Falcon Inn with Dick Jones, Tom Hearne, Humphrey
Jeffs, and other reckless roysterers, dicing and flipping
shillings at shovel-board until his finger-nails were sore.
Then Nick would read aloud to Cicely out of the “ Hun-
dred Merry Tales,” or pop old riddles at her puzzled head
until she, laughing, cried, “Enough!” But most of all
he liked the story of brave Guy of Warwick, and would
tell it again and again, with other legends of Arden Wood,
till bedtime came.

In the gray of the morning Carew would come home,
unshaven and leaden-eyed, with his bandy-legged varlet
trotting like a watch-dog at his heels; and then, if the
gaming had gone well, he was a lord, an earl, a duke, at
least, so merry and so sprightly would he be withal; but
if the dice had fallen wrong, he would by turns be raving
mad or sodden as a sunken pie.

Yet, be his temper what it might, he was but one thing
always to Cicely, and doffed ill humor like a shabby hat