Follow your nature and do as you will,
but if you would outwit an absent man no good shall come to you of it.'
'The girl is to him who can win her,' he said.
'The girl's heart is won already, Geoffrey. You may buy her from her
father but you can never win her heart, and without a heart she will be
but a poor prize.'
'Peace! now is no time for such talk of love and maids,' said my father,
'and listen. This is the tale of the Spanish murderer and your mother.
I have said nothing of it heretofore, but now it must out. When I was a
lad it happened that I also went to Spain because my father willed it. I
went to a monastery at Seville, but I had no liking for monks and their
ways, and I broke out from the monastery. For a year or more I made my
living as I best might, for I feared to return to England as a runaway.
Still I made a living and not a bad one, now in this way and now in
that, but though I am ashamed to say it, mostly by gaming, at which I
had great luck. One night I met this man Juan de Garcia--for in his hate
he gave you his true name when he would have stabbed you--at play. Even
then he had an evil fame, though he was scarcely more than a lad, but he
was handsome in person, set high in birth, and of a pleasing manner. It
chanced that he won of me at the dice, and being in a good humour, he
took me to visit at the house of his aunt, his uncle's widow, a lady of
Seville.
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