For now I knew that if I had won the father's anger, I had also won the daughter's unalterable love, and love lasts longer than wrath, and here or hereafter will win its way at length.

When I had gone a little distance I remembered the Spaniard, who had been clean forgotten by me in all this love and war, and I turned to seek him and drag him to the stocks, the which I should have done with joy, and been glad to find some one on whom to wreak my wrongs.

But when I came to the spot where I had left him, I found that fate had befriended him by the hand of a fool, for there was no Spaniard but only the village idiot, Billy Minns by name, who stood staring first at the tree to which the foreigner had been made fast, and then at a piece of silver in his hand.
'Where is the man who was tied here, Billy ?' I asked.
'I know not, Master Thomas,' he answered in his Norfolk talk which I will not set down.

'Half-way to wheresoever he was going I should say, measured by the pace at which he left when once I had set him upon his horse.' 'You set him on his horse, fool?
How long was that ago ?' 'How long! Well, it might be one hour, and it might be two.

I'm no reckoner of time, that keeps its own score like an innkeeper, without my help.