d a son."

"Then thou wilt send him home, daddy?" asked Cicely.

Carew took her hand in his, but answered nothing.

They had come to the landing.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MAKING OP A PLAYER

Master Will Shakspere was in town! The thought ran through Nick
Attwood's head like a half-remembered tune. Once or twice he had all but
sung it instead of the words of his part. Master Will Shakspere was
in town!

Could he but just find Master Shakspere, all his trouble would be over;
for the husband of his mother's own cousin would see justice done him in
spite of the master-player and the bandy-legged man with the ribbon in
his ear--of that he was sure.

But there seemed small chance of its coming about; for the doors of
Gaston Carew's house were locked and barred by day and by night, as much
to keep Nick in as to keep thieves out; and all day long, when Carew was
away, the servants went about the lower halls, and Gregory Goole's
uncanny face peered after him from every shadowy corner; and when he
went with Carew anywhere, the master-player watched him like a hawk,
while always at his heels he could hear the clump, clump, clump of the
bandy-legged man following after him.

Even were he free to go as he pleased, he knew not where to turn; for
the Lord Chamberlain's company would not be at the Blackfriars
play-house until Martinmas; and before that time to look for even Master
Will Shakspere at random in London town would be worse than hunting for
a needle in a haystack.

To be sure, he knew that the Lord Chamberlain's men were still playing
at the theater in Shoreditch; for Master Carew had taken Cicely there to
see the "Two Gentlemen of Verona." But just where Shoreditch was, Nick
had only the faintest idea--somewhere away off by Finsbury Fields,
beyond the city walls to the north of London town--and all the wide
world seemed north of London town; and the way thither lay through a
bewildering tangle of streets in which the din and the rush of the crowd
were never still.

From a hopeless chase like that Nick shrank back like a snail into its
shell. He was not too young to know that there were worse things than to
be locked in Gaston Carew's house. It were better to be a safe-kept
prisoner there than to be lost in the sinks of London. And so, knowing
this, he made the best of it.

But Master Shakspere was come back to town, and that was something. It
seemed somehow less lonely just to think of it.

Yet in truth