Page:Maid Marian - Peacock (1822).djvu/132

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Maid Marian.

found the lady spotless, found the butler a great sinner: at least so it was conjectured from the length of time he always took to confess him in the buttery.

Matilda became every day more pale and dejected: her spirit, which could have contended against any strenuous affliction, pined in the monotonous inaction to which she was condemned. While she could freely range the forest with her lover in the morning, she had been content to return to her father's castle in the evening, thus preserving underanged the balance of her duties, habits, and affections; not without a hope that the repeal of her lover's outlawry might be eventually obtained, by a judicious distribution of some of his forest-spoils among the holy fathers and saints-that-were-to-be, pious proficients in the ecclesiastic art equestrian, who rode the conscience of King Henry with double-curb

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