-horse was then called), whose
points and breeding promised speed and endurance.

"Mount, Master Robin," said Marmaduke; "I little thought we should ever
ride as friends together! Mount!--our way for some miles out of London
is the same. You go into Lincolnshire, I into the shire of Hertford."

"And for the same purpose?" asked Hilyard, as he sprang upon his horse,
and the two men rode briskly on.

"Yes!"

"Lord Warwick is changed at last?"

"At last!"

"For long?"

"Till death!"

"Good, I ask no more!"

A sound of hoofs behind made the franklin turn his head, and he saw
a goodly troop, armed to the teeth, emerge from the earl's house and
follow the lead of Marmaduke. Meanwhile Warwick was closeted with
Montagu.

Worldly as the latter was, and personally attached to Edward, he was
still keenly alive to all that touched the honour of his House; and
his indignation at the deadly insult offered to his niece was even more
loudly expressed than that of the fiery earl.

"To deem," he exclaimed, "to deem Elizabeth Woodville worthy of his
throne, and to see in Anne Nevile the only worthy to be his leman!"

"Ay!" said the earl, with a calmness perfectly terrible, from its
unnatural contrast to his ordinary heat, when but slightly chafed, "ay!
thou sayest it! But be tranquil; cold,--cold as iron, and as hard! We
must scheme now, not storm and threaten--I never schemed before! You are
right,--honesty is a fool's policy! Would I had known this but an hour
before the news reached me! I have already dismissed our friends to
their different districts, to support King Edward's cause--he is still
king,--a little while longer king! Last night, I dismissed them--last
night, at the very hour when--O God, give me patience!" He paused, and
added in a low voice, "Yet--yet--how long the moments are how long! Ere
the sun sets, Edward, I trust, will be in my power!"

"How?"

"He goes, to-day, to the More,--he will not go the less for what
hath chanced; he will trust to the archbishop to make his peace with
me,--churchmen are not fathers! Marmaduke Nevile hath my orders; a
hundred armed men, who would march against the fiend himself, if I said
the word, will surround the More, and seize the guest!"

"But what then? Who, if Edward, I dare not say the word--who is to
succeed him?"

"Clarence is the male heir."

"But with what face to the people proclaim--"

"There--there it is!" interrupted Warwick. "I have thought of that,