'Aye, magister, you are more learned even yet than I,' she said indifferently. She made a step towards the next door but he stood in front of her holding up his thin hands.
'You were my best pupil,' he said, with a hungry humility as if he mocked himself. 'Poor I am, but mated to me you should live as do the Hyperboreans, in a calm and voluptuous air.'
'Aye, to hang myself of weariness, as they do,' she answered.
He corrected her with the version of Pliny, but she answered only: 'I have a great thirst upon me.'
His eyes were humorous, despairing and excited.
'Why should a lady not love her master?' he asked. 'There are examples. Know you not the old rhyme:
'"_It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three,_ _Why lovéd of her master...._"'
'Ah, unspeakable!' she said. 'You bring me examples in the vulgar tongue!'
'I babble for joy at seeing you and for grief at your harsh words,' he answered.
She stood waiting with a sort of haughty submissiveness.
'I would you would delay your wooing. I have been on the road since dawn with neither bit nor sup.'
He protested that he had starved more hideously than Tantalus since he had seen her last.
She gave him indifferently her cheek to kiss.
'For pity's sake take me where I may rest,' she said, 'I have a maimed arm.'
He uttered her panegyric, after a model of Tibullus, to the Lady Rochford and the seven maids of honour under that lady's charge. He was set upon Katharine's enjoyment, and he invented a lie that the King had commanded a dress to be found for her to attend at the revels that night. The maids were already dressing themselves. Two of them were fairheaded, and four neither fair nor dark; but one was dark as night, and dressed all in black with a white coif, so that she resembled a magpie. Some were curling each other's hair and others tightening stay-laces with little wheels set in their companions' backs. Their bare shoulders were blue with the cold of the great room, and their dresses lay in heaps upon sheets that were spread about the clean floor--brocades sewn with pearls, velvets that were inlaid with filagree work, indoor furs and coifs of fine lawn that were delicately edged with black thread.
The high sounds of their laughter had reached through the door, but a dead silence fell. The dark girl with a very long bust that raked back like a pigeon's, and with dark and sparkling eyes, tittered derisively at the magister and went on slowly rubbing a perfumed ointment into the skin of her throat and shoulders.