?"

Brilliana's lips twitched with a derisive smile.

"Sir Blaise, honest gentleman, loves good cheer and good ease. I
think he would not quit the board if Armageddon were towards. He will
be for eating, he will be for drinking, he will be for sleeping, and
in the mean time God's chosen gentlemen have learned the value of
living so long as to grant them a death for their King."

Her voice had risen to a cry of defiance, but now it dropped again to
its former note of bantering irony.

"What a wonderful world it is which can hold at once such men as my
cousin Randolph or you or Rufus Quaryll and these hangbacks who shame
Harby. These three are professed my very good suitors, but they have
made no move to our help. Well, let them hang for a tray of knaves.
We need them not. We know that the King's cause must triumph and so
we are wise to be blithe."

Halfman's head was swinging with pleasure. She had counted him in so
glibly with the chosen ones, with the servants of God and the King.
He was very sure now that his watch-word had always been "God and the
King."

"The King's cause must triumph," he echoed, his face shining with
loyal confidence.

"How we shall all smile a year hence," Brilliana answered, "to think
that such pitiful rebels vexed us. But for the moment there is one of
these same rebels to be faced--and to be fooled. About our plan, good
captain."

Halfman saluted her more enthusiastically than he had ever saluted
male commander.

"My general," he vowed, "he shall think these walls hold an army of
wassaillers."

He turned on his heel and marched briskly out of the hall. Brilliana
looked after him, with the bright smile on her face, till the door of
the banqueting-hall closed behind him; then the smile slowly faded
from her face.

"I would my spirits were as blithe as my speech," she thought, as she
went to the table and bent over it, looking at the open map which
Halfman had been studying.

"What is going on in England, the King's England, little England,
that should not be big enough to have any room for traitors?"

She put her finger on the spot where Harby figured on the sheet.

"Here," she mused, "we have been sundered from the world for all
these days by this Roundhead leaguer, hearing no outside news but the
ring of rebel shots and the sound of rebel voices. What has happened?
What is happening? When we began the King was at Shrewsbury and the
Parliament ruled London. What has come to