That Master Will Shakspere should be so great seemed passing strange to Nick, he felt so soon at home with him. It seemed as if the master-maker of plays had a magic way of going out to and about the people he met, and of fitting his humor to them as though he were a glover with their measure in his hand.

With Nick he was nothing all day long but a jolly, wise, and gentle-hearted boy, wearing his greatness like an old cloth coat, as if it were a long-accustomed thing, and quite beyond all pride, and went about his business in a very simple way. But in the evening when the wits were met together at his house, and Nick sat on the hindmost bench and watched the noble gentlemen who came to listen to the sport, Master Will Shakspere seemed to have the knack of being ever best among them all, yet of never too much seeming to be better than the rest.

And though, for the most part, he said but little, save when some pet fancy moved him, when he did speak his conversation sparkled like a little meadow brook that drew men's best thoughts out of them like water from a spring.

And when they fell to bantering, he could turn the fag-end of another man's nothing to good account in a way so shrewd that not even Master Ben Jonson could better him--and Master Ben Jonson set up for a wit. But Master Shakspere came about as quickly as an English man-of-war, dodged here and there on a breath of wind, and seemed quite everywhere at once; while Master Jonson tacked and veered, and loomed across the elements like a great galleon, pouring forth learned broadsides with a most prodigious boom, riddling whatever was in the way, to be sure, but often quite missing the point--because Master Shakspere had come about, hey, presto, change! and was off with the argument, point and all, upon a totally different tack.

Then "Tush!" and "Fie upon thee, Will!" Master Jonson would cry with his great bluff-hearted laugh, "thou art a regular flibbertigibbet! I'll catch thee napping yet, old heart, and fill thee so full of pepper-holes that thou wilt leak epigrams. But quits--I must be home, or I shall catch it from my wife. Faith, Will, thou shouldst see my little Ben!"

"I'll come some day," Master Shakspere would say; "give him my love"; and his mouth would smile, though his eyes were sad, for his own son Hamnet was dead.

Then, when the house was still again, and all had said good-by, Nick doffed his clothes and laid him down to sleep in peace. Yet he often wakened in the night, because his heart was dancing so.

In the morning, when the world began to stir outside, and the early light came in at the window, he slipped out of bed across the floor, and threw the casement wide. Over the river, and over the town, and over the hills that lay blue in the north, was Stratford!

The damp, cool air from the garden below seemed a primrose whiff from the lane behind his father's house. He could hear the cocks crowing in Surrey, and the lowing of the kine. There was a robin singing in a bush under the window, and there was some one in the garden with a pair of pruning-shears. Snip-snip! snip-snip! he heard them going. The light in the east was pink as a peach-bloom and too intense to bear.

"Good-morrow, Master Early-bird!" a merry voice called up to him, and a nosegay dropped on the window-ledge at his side. He looked down. There in the path among the rose-trees was Master Will Shakspere, laughing. He had on an ancient leathern jacket and a hat with a hole in its crown; and the skirts of the jacket were dripping with dew from the bushes.

"Good-morrow, sir," said Nick, and bowed. "It is a lovely day."

"Most beautiful indeed! How comes the sun?"

"Just up, sir; the river is afire with it now. O-oh!" Nick held his breath, and watched the light creep down the wall, darting long bars of rosy gold through the snowy bloom of the apple-trees, until it rested upon Master Shakspere's face, and made a fleeting glory there.

Then Master Shakspere stretched himself a little in the sun, laughing softly, and said, "It is the sweetest music in the world--morning, spring, and God's dear sunshine; it starteth kindness brewing in the heart, like sap in a withered bud. What sayest, lad? We'll fetch the little maid to-day; and then--away for Stratford town!"

But when Master Shakspere and Nicholas Attwood came to Gaston Carew's house, the constables had taken charge, the servants were scattering hither and thither, and Cicely Carew was gone.

The bandy-legged man, the butler said, had come on Sunday in great haste, and packing up his goods, without a word of what had befallen his master, had gone away, no one knew whither, and had taken Cicely with him. Nor had they questioned what he did, for they all feared the rogue, and judged him to have authority.

Nick caught a moment at the lintel of the door. The house was full of voices, and the sound of trampling feet went up and down from room to room; but all he heard was Gaston Carew's worn voice saying, "Thou'lt keep my Cicely from harm?"