ad doubtfully. "Walter
Blunt is a parlous evil-minded knave, and methinks will do whatever evil
he promiseth."

"I fear him not," said Myles again; but his heart foreboded trouble.

The coming of the head squire made a very great change in the condition
of affairs. Even before that coming the bachelors had somewhat recovered
from their demoralization, and now again they began to pluck up their
confidence and to order the younger squires and pages upon this personal
service or upon that.

"See ye not," said Myles one day, when the Knights of the Rose were
gathered in the Brutus Tower--"see ye not that they grow as bad as ever?
An we put not a stop to this overmastery now, it will never stop."

"Best let it be, Myles," said Wilkes. "They will kill thee an thou cease
not troubling them. Thou hast bred mischief enow for thyself already."

"No matter for that," said Myles; "it is not to be borne that they order
others of us about as they do. I mean to speak to them to-night, and
tell them it shall not be."

He was as good as his word. That night, as the youngsters were shouting
and romping and skylarking, as they always did before turning in, he
stood upon his cot and shouted: "Silence! List to me a little!" And
then, in the hush that followed--"I want those bachelors to hear this:
that we squires serve them no longer, and if they would ha' some to wait
upon them, they must get them otherwheres than here. There be twenty of
us to stand against them and haply more, and we mean that they shall ha'
service of us no more."

Then he jumped down again from his elevated stand, and an uproar of
confusion instantly filled the place. What was the effect of his words
upon the bachelors he could not see. What was the result he was not slow
in discovering.

The next day Myles and Gascoyne were throwing their daggers for a
wager at a wooden target against the wall back of the armorer's smithy.
Wilkes, Gosse, and one or two others of the squires were sitting on
a bench looking on, and now and then applauding a more than usually
well-aimed cast of the knife. Suddenly that impish little page spoken of
before, Robin Ingoldsby, thrust his shock head around the corner of
the smithy, and said: "Ho, Falworth! Blunt is going to serve thee out
to-day, and I myself heard him say so. He says he is going to slit thine
ears." And then he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared.

Myles darted after him, caught him midway in the quadrangle, and