Nor can I guess why she would have speech with Reuben." "I can guess shrewdly at that," said the young man.

"It so befell this morning that I found a party of roisterers at her door, who were marking it with a red cross, as though it were a plague-stricken house--as the Magistrates talk of marking them now if the distemper spreads much further and wider.

The bold lady had herself put these fellows to the rout by pouring pitch upon them from a window above; but I stopped to rebuke the foremost of them myself, and to erase their handiwork from the door.

I did not know that I was either seen or known; but methinks my Lady Scrope has eyes in the back of her head, as the saying goes." "You may well say that!" cried Dorcas, with a laugh and a shrug.
"Never was there such a woman for knowing everything and everybody.
But she spoke not to me of any roisterers.

Would I had been there to see her pouring her filthy compound over them! She always has it ready.