d I feared you might intend to abstain from seeking me."

He almost held his breath while she spoke, caught in amazement. He was
standing close beside her chair, his right hand rested upon its tall
back.

"Did you so intend?" she asked him.

"I told you even now," he answered with hard-won calm, "that I had made
you a sort of promise."

"I... I would not have you keep it," she murmured. She heard his sharply
indrawn breath, felt him leaning over her, and was filled with an
unaccountable fear.

"Was it to tell me this you came?" he asked her, his voice reduced to a
whisper.

"No... yes," she answered, an agony in her mind, which groped for some
means to keep him by her side until his danger should be overpast. That
much she owed him in honour if in nothing else.

"No--yes?" he echoed, and he had drawn himself erect again. "What is't
you mean, Ruth?"

"I mean that it was that, yet not quite only that."

"Ah!" Disappointment vibrated faintly in his clamation. "What else?"

"I would have you abandon Monmouth's following," she told him.

He stared a moment, moved away and round where he could confront her.
The flush had now faded from her face. This he observed and the heave
of her bosom in its low bodice. He knit his brows, perplexed. Here was
surely more than at first might seem.

"Why so?" he asked.

"For your own safety's sake," she answered him.

"You are oddly concerned for that, Ruth."

"Concerned--not oddly." She paused an instant, swallowed hard, and then
continued. "I am concerned too for your honour, and there is no honour
in following his banner. He has crowned himself King, and so proved
himself a self-seeker who came dissembled as the champion of a cause
that he might delude poor ignorant folk into flocking to his standard
and helping him to his ambitious ends."

"You are wondrously well schooled," said he. "Whose teachings do you
recite me? Sir Rowland Blake's?"

At another time the sneer might have cut her. At the moment she was too
intent upon gaining time. The means to it mattered little. The more she
talked to no purpose, the more at random was their discourse, the better
would her ends be served.

"Sir Rowland Blake?" she cried. "What is he to me?"

"Ah, what? Let me set you the question rather."

"Less than nothing," she assured him, and for some moments afterwards it
was this Sir Rowland who served them as a topic for their odd interview.
On the overmantel the pulse of time bea