"Mr. Congleton," she cried, "you do hear what this wench saith. I pray you to bear it in mind, and how near in blood she is to me, so that you may show her favor when I am gone, which may be sooner than you think for."
I looked up into her face greatly concerned that she was like so soon to die. Methought she had the semblance of one in good health and a reasonable good color in her cheeks, and I perceived Mr. Congleton did smile as he answered:
"I will show favor to thy pretty niece, good Moll, I promise thee, be thou alive or be thou dead; but if the leeches are to be credited, who do affirm thou hast the best strength and stomach of the twain, thou art more like to bury me than I thee."
Upon which the good lady did sigh deeply and cast up her eyes and lifted up her hands as one grievously injured, and he cried:
"Prithee, sweetheart, take it not amiss, for beshrew me if I be not willing to grant thee to be as diseased as will pleasure thee, so that thou wilt continue to eat and sleep as well as thou dost at the present and so keep thyself from dying."
Upon which she said that she did admire how a man could have so much cruelty as to jest and jeer at her ill-health, but that she would spend no more of her breath upon him; and turning toward me she asked a store of questions anent my father, whom for many years she had not seen, and touching the manner of my mother's death, at the mention of which my tears flowed afresh, which caused her also to weep; and calling for her women she bade one of them bring her some hartshorn, for that sorrow, she said, would occasion the vapors to rise in her head, and the other she sent for to fetch her case of trinkets, for that she would wear the ring her brother had presented her with some years back, in which was a stone which doth cure melancholy. When the case was brought she displayed before my eyes its rich contents, and gifted me with a brooch set with turquoises, the wearing of which, she said, doth often keep persons from falling into divers sorts of peril. Then presently kissing me she said she felt fatigued, and would send for her daughters to take charge of me; who, when they came, embraced me with exceeding great affection, and carried me to what had been their schoolroom and was now Mrs. Ward's chamber, who no longer was their governess, they said, but as a friend abode in the house for to go abroad with them, their mother being of so delicate a constitution that she seldom left her room. Next to this chamber was a closet, wherein Kate said I should lie, and as it is one I inhabited for a long space of time, and the remembrance of which doth connect itself with very many events which, as they did take place, I therein mused on, and prayed or wept, or sometimes laughed over in solitude, I will here set down what it was like when first I saw it.