r-cloud over a mountain. And the days went on, and
lessons with Mr. Parados were a sort of Inquisition torture to Dickie.
For the tutor never let a day pass without trying to find out whether
Dickie had shared in any way that guilty knowledge of Elfrida's which
had, so Mr. Parados insisted, overthrown the fell plot of the Papists
and preserved to a loyal people His Most Gracious Majesty James the
First.

And then one day, quite as though it were the most natural thing in the
world, his cousin Edred and Lady Arden his aunt were set free from the
Tower and came home. The King had suddenly decided that they at least
had had nothing to do with the plot. Lady Arden cried all the time, and,
as Dickie owned to himself, "there was enough to make her." But Edred
was full of half thought-out plans and schemes for being revenged on old
Parrot-nose. And at last he really did arrange a scheme for getting
Elfrida out of the Tower--a perfectly workable scheme. And what is more,
it worked. If you want to know how it was done, ask some grown-up to
tell you how Lady Nithsdale got her husband out of the Tower when he was
a prisoner there, and in danger of having his head cut off, and you will
readily understand the kind of scheme it was. A necessary part of it was
the dressing up of Elfrida in boy's clothes, and her coming out of the
Tower, pretending to be Edred, who, with Richard, had come in to visit
Lord Arden. Then the guard at the Tower gateway was changed, and another
Edred came out, and they all got into a coach, and there was Elfrida
under the coach seat among the straw and other people's feet, and they
all hugged each other in the dark coach as it jolted through the snowy
streets to Arden House in Soho.

Dickie, feeling very small and bewildered among all these dangerous
happenings, found himself suddenly caught by the arm. The nurse's hand
it was.

"Now," she said, "Master Richard will go take off his fine suit,
and----" He did not hear the end, for he was pushed out of the room.
Very discontentedly he found his way to his panelled bed-closet, and
took off the smart velvet and fur which he had worn in his visit to the
Tower, and put on his every-day things. You may be sure he made every
possible haste to get back to his cousins. He wanted to talk over the
whole wonderful adventure with them. He found them whispering in a
corner.

"What is it?" he asked.

"We're going to be even with old Parrot-nose," said Edred, "but you