No! there was no danger—­as yet!

But he cursed himself for a fool and a coward, not to have gone away—­abroad—­long ere such a possible confrontation threatened him.  He cursed himself for being here at all—­and above all for having left the smith’s clothes and the leather wallet in that lonely pavilion in the park.

Squire Boatfield’s kind eyes now rested on the old woman, who, awed and silent—­shut out by her infirmities from this strange drama which was being enacted in her cottage—­had stood calm and impassive by, trying to read with that wonderful quickness of intuition which the poverty of one sense gives to the others—­what was going on round her, since she could not hear.

Her eyes—­pale and dim, heavy-lidded and deeply-lined—­rested often on the face of Richard Lambert, who, leaning against the corner of the hearth, had watched the proceedings silently and intently.  When the Quakeress’s faded gaze met that of the young man, there was a quick and anxious look which passed from her to him:  a look of entreaty for comfort, one of fear and of growing horror.

“And so the exiled prince lodged in your cottage, mistress?” said Squire Boatfield, after a while, turning to Mistress Lambert.

The old woman’s eyes wandered from Richard to the squire.  The look of fear in them vanished, giving place to good-natured placidity.  She shuffled forward, in the manner which had so oft irritated her lodger.

“Eh? ... what?” she queried, approaching the squire, “I am somewhat hard of hearing these times.”

“We were speaking of your lodger, mistress,” rejoined Boatfield, raising his voice, “harm hath come to him, you know.”

“Aye! aye!” she replied blandly, “harm hath come to our lodger....  Nay! the Lord hath willed it so....  The stranger was queer in his ways....  I don’t wonder that harm hath come to him....”

“You remember him well, mistress?—­him and the clothes he used to wear?” asked Squire Boatfield.

“Oh, yes!  I remember the clothes,” she rejoined.  “I saw them again on the dead who now lieth in Adam’s forge ... the same curious clothes of a truth ... clothes the Lord would condemn as wantonness and vanity....  I saw them again on the dead man,” she reiterated garrulously, “the frills and furbelows ... things the Lord hateth ... and which no Christian should place upon his person ... yet the foreigner wore them ... he had none other ... and went out with them on him that night that the Lord sent him down into perdition....”

“Did you see him go out that night, mistress?” asked the squire.

“Eh? ... what? ...”

“Did he go out alone?”

The dimmed eyes of the old woman roamed restlessly from face to face.  It seemed as if that look of horror and of fear once more struggled to appear within the pale orbs.  Yet the squire looked on her with kindness, and Lady Sue’s tear-veiled eyes expressed boundless sympathy.  Richard, on the other hand, did not look at her, his gaze was riveted on Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse with an intensity which caused the latter to meet that look, trying to defy it, and then to flinch before its expression of passionate wrath.