Yet when the twilight shut in, gray with drizzling rain, there came on him a heavy feeling of uncertainty; his own determination, though he felt so sure of it, weakened a little before the memory of the opposition of all his friends. In such a mood he loitered into the cottage parlor, where, finding the Widow Flemyng sitting idle in the dusk, he drew up a stool and blurted out to her his true name and how matters stood with him. “I fear you’d not have cared to harbor me, had you known what a charge I lay under,” he concluded humbly.
“Why, child, I suspected all along,” the good woman hastened to reply, and Hugh, staring dutifully at the gray rain outside the lattice, thought it wise not to contradict her. It gratified him, too, as she continued speaking, to find she did not hold him a fool for his resolution. Indeed, she said emphatically no worse harm could befall a decent lad at Oxford than at Woodstead, and in any case she was well assured no one would ever have the heart to hang him. “You were best cast yourself on the king’s mercy,” she ended. “Now had you great friends at court, or could get to have audience with his Majesty.”
“Did you ever hear the ballad of ‘Johnny Armstrong’?” Hugh asked. “Dick used to sing it. There was a man sought the king for pardon and he got little good by it.”
All the same her assurances made him more confident in himself, so he slept that night untroubled and woke ready for whatever the day might bring. Perhaps it was the widow’s continued encouragements, perhaps it was the good breakfast he made, or perhaps the sight of the sun struggling through the watery clouds, that served still farther to put him in high spirits. Be as that may, he took a gay farewell of Widow Flemyng and of Nancy, and cantered out by the pasture lane at a hopeful pace, as if he were eager to cover the distance to Oxford and whatever waited him there.
The rain of the preceding day had laid the dust well, and left in the air a lingering fragrance of moist earth and beaten grasses that made it a temptation to slacken speed along the country road. In the hedges by the wayside the honeysuckle was still dripping with wet; Hugh pulled a tuft of blossoms as he passed, and crushed them slowly in his bare hand. How sweet and good was life in summer time, he reflected, and then he flung the blossoms away and, whistling persistently, thought no more, for his mind was all made up.