!' answered the other. His words and manner
showed the bitterness that was mingled with his regret. 'But say no more
of him. You know what has happened since, I suppose?'

'I know that they say Monmouth is taken, Sir Thomas, but I can't think it
true,' answered Swetman.

'O zounds! 'tis true enough,' cried the knight, 'and that's not all. The
Duke was executed on Tower Hill two days ago.'

'D'ye say it verily?' says Swetman.

'And a very hard death he had, worse luck for 'n,' said Sir Thomas.
'Well, 'tis over for him and over for my brother. But not for the rest.
There'll be searchings and siftings down here anon; and happy is the man
who has had nothing to do with this matter!'

Now Swetman had hardly heard the latter words, so much was he confounded
by the strangeness of the tidings that the Duke had come to his death on
the previous Tuesday. For it had been only the night before this present
day of Friday that he had seen his former guest, whom he had ceased to
doubt could be other than the Duke, come into his chamber and fetch away
his accoutrements as he had promised.

'It couldn't have been a vision,' said Christopher to himself when the
knight had ridden on. 'But I'll go straight and see if the things be in
the closet still; and thus I shall surely learn if 'twere a vision or
no.'

To the closet he went, which he had not looked into since the stranger's
departure. And searching behind the articles placed to conceal the
things hidden, he found that, as he had never doubted, they were gone.

When the rumour spread abroad in the West that the man beheaded in the
Tower was not indeed the Duke, but one of his officers taken after the
battle, and that the Duke had been assisted to escape out of the country,
Swetman found in it an explanation of what so deeply mystified him. That
his visitor might have been a friend of the Duke's, whom the Duke had
asked to fetch the things in a last request, Swetman would never admit.
His belief in the rumour that Monmouth lived, like that of thousands of
others, continued to the end of his days.

* * * * *

Such, briefly, concluded my kinsman, is the tradition which has been
handed down in Christopher Swetman's family for the last two hundred
years.

A MERE INTERLUDE

CHAPTER I

The traveller in school-books, who vouched in dryest tones for the
fidelity to fact of the following narrative, used to add a ring of truth
to it by opening with a nicety of