sleep when we've settled this
business. We'll not leave poor Moll to bear all the punishment of our
getting. Mr. Godwin shall know what an innocent, simple child she was
when we pushed her into this knavery, and how we dared not tell her of
our purpose lest she should draw back. He shall know how she was ever an
obedient, docile, artless girl, yielding always to my guidance; and you
can stretch a point, Kit, to say you have ever known me for a
headstrong, masterful sort of a fellow, who would take denial from none,
but must have my own way in all things. I'll take all the blame on my
own shoulders, as I should have done at first, but I was so staggered by
this fall."

"Well," says I, "if you will have it so--"

"I will," says he, stoutly. "And now give me a bucket of water that I
may souse my head, and wear a brave look. I would have him think the
worst of me that he may feel the kinder to poor Moll. And I'll make what
atonement I can," adds he, as I led him into my bed-chamber. "If he
desire it, I will promise never to see Moll again; nay, I will offer to
take the king's bounty, and go a-sailoring; and so, betwixt sickness and
the Dutch, there'll be an end of Jack Dawson in a very short space."

When he had ducked his head in a bowl of water, and got our cloaks from
the room below, we went to the door, and there, to my dismay, I found
the lock fast and the key which I had left in its socket gone.

"What's amiss, Kit?" asks Dawson, perceiving my consternation.

"The key, the key!" says I, holding the candle here and there to seek it
on the floor, then, giving up my search as it struck me that Mr. Godwin
and Moll could not have left the house had the door been locked on the
inside; "I do believe we are locked in and made prisoners," says I.

"Why, sure, this is not Mr. Godwin's doing!" cries he.

"'Tis Simon," says I, with conviction, seeing him again in my mind,
standing behind Mr. Godwin, with wicked triumph in his face.

"Is there no other door but this one?" asks Dawson.

"There is one at the back, but I have never yet opened that, for lack of
a key." And now setting one thing against another, and recalling how I
had before found the door open, when I felt sure I had locked it fast,
the truth appeared to me; namely, that Simon had that key and did get in
the back way, going out by the front on that former occasion in haste
upon some sudden alarm.

"Is there never a window we can slip through?" asks Jack.