There were both gold and silver.  The silver he put back into the purse again; the gold he counted carefully; and as he counted, laying the pieces one by one in little heaps upon the cloth, he muttered under his breath, like a small boy adding up his sums in school, saying over and over again, “One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew.  One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew”; and told the coins off in keeping with the count, so that the last pile was as large as both the others put together.  Then slowly ending, “None for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew,” he laid the last three nobles with the rest.

Then he arose and stood a moment listening to the silence in the house.  An old he rat that was gnawing a rind on the hearth looked up, and ran a little nearer to his hole.  “Tsst! come back,” said Carew, “I’m no cat!” and from the sliding panel in the wall took out a buckskin bag tied like a meal-sack with a string.

As he slipped the knot the throat of the bag sagged down, and a gold piece jangled on the floor.  Carew started as if all his nerves had leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a flash.  Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and left, blew the candle out.

A little while he stood and listened in the dark; a little while his feet went to and fro in the darkness.  The wind cried in the chimney.  Now and then the casements shivered.  The timbers in the wall creaked with the cold, and the boards in the stairway cracked.  Then the old he rat came back to his rind, and his mate came out of the crack in the wall, working her whiskers hungrily and snuffing the smell of the candle-drip; for there was no sound, and the coast of rat-land was clear.

CHAPTER XXX

AT THE FALCON INN

     And then there came both mist and snow,
       And it grew wondrous cold;
     And ice mast-high came floating by,
       As green as emerald.

So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.

But over London came a gale that made the chimneys rock; and after it came ice and snow, sharp, stinging sleet, and thumping hail, with sickening winds from the gray west, sour yellow fogs, and plunging rain, till all the world was weary of the winter and the cold.

But winter could not last forever.  March crept onward, and the streets of London came up out of the slush again with a glad surprise of cobblestones.  The sickly mist no longer hung along the river; and sometimes upon a breezy afternoon it was pleasant and fair, the sun shone warmly on one’s back, and the rusty sky grew bluer overhead.  The trees in Paris Garden put out buds; the lilac-tips began to swell; there was a stirring in the roadside grass, and now and then a questing bird went by upon the wind, piping a little silver thread of song.  Nick’s heart grew hungry for the woods of Arden and the gathering rush of the waking water-brooks among the old dead leaves.  The rain beat in at his window, but he did not care for that, and kept it open day and night; for when he wakened in the dark he loved to feel the fingers of the wind across his face.