"Have you thought--"

"Forgive my interruption. I have thought of everything. Miss Cary, you
heard the vow which I took to God and Flora Drummond--never to lose
sight of Angus, and to keep him true and safe. I have kept it so far as
it lay in me, and I will keep it to the end. Come what may, I will be
true to God and her."

And looking up into his eyes, I saw--revealed to me as by a flash of
lightning--what was Duncan Keith's most precious thing.

"Now, Miss Caroline," said Mr Raymond, "will you kindly go up with this
lady,"--I fancied I heard the shortest possible sign of hesitation
before the last two words,--"and she will be so good as to help you to
assume the dress you are to wear."

I went up-stairs with the beautiful woman, who gave a little laugh as
she shut the door.

"Poor Mr Raymond!" said she; "I feel so sorry for the man. Nature
meant him to be a Tory, and education has turned him into a Whig. He
has the kindest of hearts, and the most unmanageable of consciences. He
will help us to free a prisoner, but he would not call me anything but
`Mistress' to save his life."

"And your Ladyship--?" said I, guessing in an instant what she ought to
be called, and that she was the wife of a peer--not a Hanoverian peer.

"Oh, my Ladyship can put up with it very well," said she, laughing, as
she helped me off with my evening dress. "I wish I may never have
anything worse. The man would not pain me for the world. It is only
his awful Puritan conscience; Methodist, perhaps, Puritan was the word
in my day. When one lives in exile, one almost loses one's native
tongue."

And I thought I heard a light sigh. Her Ladyship, however, said no
more, except what had reference to our business. When the process was
over, I found myself in a printed linen gown, with a linen hood on my
head, a long white apron made quite plain, and stout clumsy shoes.

"Now, be as vulgar as you possibly can," said her Ladyship. "Try to
forget all your proprieties, and do everything th' wrong way. You are
Betty Walkden, if you please, and Mr Hebblethwaite is Joel Walkden, and
your brother. You are a washerwoman, and your mistress, Mrs
Richardson, lives in Chelsea. Don't forget your history. Oh! I am
forgetting one thing myself. Colonel Keith, and therefore Lieutenant
Drummond, as they are the same person for this evening, is Will Clowes,
a young gardener at Wandsworth, who is your lover, of whom your brother
Joel does not p