'Oh, ho, vermin!' cried the steward, frantic with rage. 'That is the tongue you dare to use to me, is it? Spawn of the devil you always were, and the pity is that the days are gone by when one could have had you burned as the devil's daughter. Pray you, now, do you know whose ground this is?'
She gave a gesture of negation, of indifference, of ignorance. She had never thought of the ground as any one's property; it belonged to God and his dead. The moor was free to all, so she thought. These great green silent lands seemed too vast, too mute, too solemn, to be parcelled out amidst the legal claims of men. Who claimed the sea? Who would, went on it, gleaned from it, was fed by it, lulled by it, devoured by it when it was in haste and rage. As the sea was free to all, so she had always believed was the plain.
'Well, this land is the prince's, my master's," said the man with great unction and vicious wrath united. 'If we had known that you had harboured here, out you would have gone, long, long ago. And, indeed, it would go hard with you now did my master choose to have the law on you, for who knows what treasures you may not
