able to see.

Rollo recoiled into the reeds as if a serpent had bitten him. Then
parting the tall tasselled canes carefully, he gazed out upon the
curious scene. A window stood open in the rear of the building, and the
draught blew the flame of the open lantern about, threatening every
moment to extinguish it.

One of the gipsies, observing this, moved to the bracket-shelf to close
the glass bull's-eye of the lantern.

A couple of others looked after him to see what he was about, and
through the gap thus made Rollo saw, with only a shawl thrown over her
white night-gear, the little Queen herself, held fast in a gipsy's bare
and swarthy arms.

"I have told you before," he heard her say in her clear childish treble,
"I know nothing--I will tell nothing. I have nothing to give you, and if
I had a whole world I would not give a _maravedi's_ worth to you. You
are bad men, and I hate you!"

Rollo could not hear what the men said in reply, but presently as one
dusky ruffian bent over the girl, a thin cord in his hand, high and
bitter rose a child's cry of pain.

It went straight to Rollo's heart. He had heard nothing like it since
Peggy Ramsay got a thorn in her foot the day he had wickedly persuaded
her to strip and run barefoot over the meadows of Castle Blair. He
compressed his lips, and moved his knife to see that the haft came
rightly to his hand. Then as calmly as if practising at a mark he
examined his pistols and with the utmost deliberation drew a bead upon
the burly ruffian with the cord. The first pistol cracked, and the man
dropped silently. Instantly there ensued a great commotion within. The
most part of the gipsies rushed to the door, standing for a moment
clear against the lighted interior.

Rollo, all on fire with the idea that the villains had been torturing a
child, fired his second pistol into the thick of them, upon which arose
a sudden sharp shriek and a furious rushing this way and that. The lamp
was blown out or knocked over in the darkness, and Rollo, hesitating not
a moment, snapped back the great Albacetan blade into its catch and
rushed like a charging tiger at the door. Twice on his way was he run
against and almost overturned by fugitives from the pavilion. On each
occasion his opponents' fear of the mysterious fusillade, aided by a
sharp application of the point of the _Albacete_, cleared Rollo's front.
He stumbled over a body prone on the ground, caught his hand on the cold
stone linte