The next moment the lantern was flung up almost into his eyes, and in the light he saw the sharp, round rim of a pistol-barrel directed immediately against his forehead.

In that moment our young gentleman’s life hung as a hair in the balance.  In the intense instant of expectancy his brain appeared to expand as a bubble, and his ears tingled and hummed as though a cloud of flies were buzzing therein.  Then suddenly a voice smote like a blow upon the silence—­“Who are you, and what d’ye want?”

“Indeed,” said Dunburne, “I do not know.”

“What do you do here?”

“Nor do I know that, either.”

He who held the lantern lifted it so that the illumination fell still more fully upon Dunburne’s face and person.  Then his interlocutor demanded, “How did you come here?”

Upon the moment Dunburne determined to answer so much of the truth as the question required. “’Twas by no fault of my own,” he cried.  “I was knocked on the head and kidnapped in England, with the design of being sold in Baltimore.  The vessel that fetched me put into the harbor over yonder to wait for good weather, and I jumped overboard and swam ashore, to stumble into the cursed pickle in which I now find myself.”

“Have you, then, an education?  To be sure, you talk so.”

“Indeed I have,” said Dunburne—­“a decent enough education to fit me for a gentleman, if the opportunity offered.  But what of that?” he exclaimed, desperately.  “I might as well have no more learning than a beggar under the bush, for all the good it does me.”  The other once more flashed the light of his lantern over our young gentleman’s miserable and barefoot figure.  “I had a mind,” says he, “to blow your brains out against the wall.  I have a notion now, however, to turn you to some use instead, so I’ll just spare your life for a little while, till I see how you behave.”

He spoke with so much more of jocularity than he had heretofore used that Dunburne recovered in great part his dawning assurance.  “I am infinitely obliged to you,” he cried, “for sparing my brains; but I protest I doubt if you will ever find so good an opportunity again to murder me as you have just enjoyed.”

This speech seemed to tickle the other prodigiously, for he burst into a loud and boisterous laugh, under cover of which he thrust his pistol back into his coat-pocket again.  “Come with me, and I’ll fit you with victuals and decent clothes, of both of which you appear to stand in no little need,” he said.  Thereupon, and without another word, he turned and quitted the place, accompanied by his companion, who for all this time had uttered not a single sound.  A little way from the church these two parted company, with only a brief word spoken between them.

Dunburne’s interlocutor, with our young gentleman following close behind him, led the way in silence for a considerable distance through the long, wet grass and the tempestuous darkness, until at last, still in unbroken silence, they reached the confines of an enclosure, and presently stood before a large and imposing house built of brick.