e as an answer to foreign
princes, and my head would have to pay for it, however welcome it might
be! So, good Mr. Talbot, supposing any alarm should arise, keep you
close to the person of this lady, for there be those who would make the
fray a colour for taking her life, under pretext of hindering her from
being carried off."

It was no wonder that a warder in such circumstances looked harassed
and perplexed, and showed himself glad of being joined by any ally whom
he could trust. In truth, harsh and narrow as he was, Paulett was too
good and religious a man for the task that had been thrust on him,
where loyal obedience, sense of expediency, and even religious
fanaticism, were all in opposition to the primary principles of truth,
mercy, and honour. He was, besides, in constant anxiety, living as he
did between plot and counterplot, and with the certainty that
emissaries of the Council surrounded him who would have no scruple in
taking Mary's life, and leaving him to bear the blame, when Elizabeth
would have to explain the deed to the other sovereigns of Europe. He
disclosed almost all this to Humfrey, whose frank, trustworthy
expression seemed to move him to unusual confidence.

At supper-time another person appeared, whom Humfrey thought he had
once seen at Sheffield--a thin, yellow-haired and bearded man, much
marked with smallpox, in the black dress of a lawyer, who sat above the
household servants, though below the salt. Paulett once drank to him
with a certain air of patronage, calling him Master Phillipps, a name
that came as a revelation to Humfrey. Phillipps was the decipherer who
had, he knew, been employed to interpret Queen Mary's letters after the
Norfolk plot. Were there, then, fresh letters of that unfortunate lady
in his hands, or were any to be searched for and captured?

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE CASTLE WELL.

"What vantage or what thing
Gett'st thou thus for to sting,
Thou false and flatt'ring liar?
Thy tongue doth hurt, it's seen
No less than arrows keen
Or hot consuming fire."

So sang the congregation in the chapel at Chartley, in the strains of
Sternhold and Hopkins, while Humfrey Talbot could not forbear from a
misgiving whether these falsehoods were entirely on the side to which
they were thus liberally attributed. Opposite to him stood Cicely, in
her dainty Sunday farthingale of white, embroidered with violet buds,
and a green and violet boddice to match,