o no further trouble."

She looked up at him, and returned him smile for smile.

"I know nothing," she said, "of what you tell me, or of what you ask."

His countenance hardened.

"Then, mistress, the search must go on."

But a shout from the adjoining room announced that it was at an end.
Nelthorp had been discovered and dragged from the chimney into which he
had crept.

Almost exactly a month later--on August 27th the Lady Alice Lisle was
brought to the bar of the court-house at Winchester upon a charge of
high treason.

The indictment ran that secretly, wickedly, and traitorously she did
entertain, conceal, comfort, uphold, and maintain John Hicks, knowing
him to be a false traitor, against the duty of her allegiance and
against the peace of "our sovereign lord the King that now is."

Demurely dressed in grey, the little white-haired lady calmly faced the
Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the four judges of oyer and terminer who
sat with him, and confidently made her plea of "Not Guilty."

It was inconceivable that Christian men should deal harshly with her for
a technical offence amounting to an act of Christian charity. And the
judge, sitting there in his robe of scarlet reversed with ermine, looked
a gentle, kindly man; his handsome, oval, youthful face--Jeffreys was in
his thirty-sixth year--set in the heavy black periwig, was so pale that
the mouth made a vivid line of scarlet; and the eyes that now surveyed
her were large and liquid and compassionate, as it seemed to her.

She was not to know that the pallor which gave him so interesting an
air, and the dark stains which lent his eyes that gentle wistfulness,
were the advertisements at once of the debauch that had kept him from
his bed until after two o'clock that morning and of the inexorable
disease that slowly gnawed away his life and enraged him out of all
humanity.

And the confidence his gentle countenance inspired was confirmed by
the first words he had occasion to address to her. She had interrupted
counsel to the Crown when, in his opening address to the jury--composed
of some of the most considerable gentlemen of Hampshire--he seemed to
imply that she had been in sympathy with Monmouth's cause. She was, of
course, without counsel, and must look herself to her defence.

"My lord," she cried, "I abhorred that rebellion as much as any woman in
the world!"

Jeffreys leaned forward with a restraining gesture.

"Look you, Mrs. Lisle," he admo