For always as they crouched by the smoking hearth they dreamed of Grey Dick and his terrible arrows.
Sir Edmund Acour's letter came safely into the hands of Eve, brought to her by the Mayor himself.

It read thus: Lady, You will no more of me, so however much you should live to ask it, I will have no more of you.

I go hang your merchant lout, and afterward away to France, who wish to have done with your cold Suffolk, where you may buy my lands cheap if you will.

Yet, should Master Hugh de Cressi chance to escape me, I counsel you to marry him, for I can wish you no worse fate, seeing what you will be, than to remember what you might have been.

Meanwhile it is my duty as a Christian to tell you, in case you should desire to speak to him ere it be too late, that your father lies at the point of death from a sickness brought on by his grief at the slaying of his son and your cruel desertion of him, and calls for you in his ravings.