sister had
never imagined that there was any danger worse than the presence of
"King George" in the window corner, and as for me, the hope of helping
to protect Miss Irma herself from unknown peril was enough. I asked for
no better a chance than that.

"We have a cousin," she continued, "Lalor Maitland is his name, who was
in the rebellion, and was outlawed just like my father. He took up the
trade of spying on the poor folk abroad and all who had dealings with
them. He was made governor of the strong castle of Dinant on the Meuse,
deep in the Low Countries. With him my father, who wrongly trusted him
as he trusted everybody, left little Louis. I was with my aunt, the
Abbess of the Ursulines, at the time, or the thing had not befallen. For
from the first I hated Lalor Maitland, knowing that though he appeared
to be kind to us, it was only a pretence.

"He entertained us hospitably enough in a suite of rooms very high up in
the Castle of Dinant above the Meuse river, and came to see us every
day. He was waiting till he should make his peace with the English. Then
he would do away with my brother and----"

She paused, and a kind of shuddering whiteness came across the girl's
face. It was like the flashing of lightning from the east to the west
that my grandmother reads about in her Bible--a sort of shining of
hatred and determination like a footstep set on wet sand. "But no," she
added, "he would not have married me, even if he had kept me shut up for
ever in his Castle of Dinant on the Meuse!"

Then all at once I began very mightily to hate this Lalor Maitland,
Governor of the Castle of Dinant. I resolved to charge "King George" to
the very muzzle, wait till he was within half-a-dozen paces, and--let
him have it. For I made no doubt that it was he who was coming in
person to carry off Miss Irma and Sir Louis back again to his dungeons.
For though Irma had not called them that, I felt sure that she had been
shamefully used. And though I did not proclaim the fact, I knew the name
and address of a willing deliverer. I grew so anxious about the matter
that Agnes Anne three times bade me put down "King George" or I should
be sure to shoot some of them, or, most likely of all, little Louis in
his cot-bed up-stairs.

"However, at last we escaped" (Miss Irma went on), "and I will tell you
how--what I have not told to any here--not even to your good grandmother
or the clergyman. It was through our nurse, a Kirkbean woman an