For this reason Sir Marmaduke had originally chosen Adam Lambert’s cottage to be his headquarters; it stood on the very outskirts of the village and as he had only the wood to traverse between it and the pavilion where he effected his change of personality, he ran thus but few risks of meeting prying eyes.  Moreover, Adam Lambert, the blacksmith, and the old woman who kept house for him, both belonged to the new religious sect which Judge Bennett had so pertinently dubbed the Quakers, and they kept themselves very much aloof from gossip and the rest of the village.

True, Richard Lambert oft visited his brother and the old woman, but did so always in the daytime when Prince Amede d’Orleans carefully kept out of the way.  Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse had all the true instincts of the beast or bird of prey.  He prowled about in the dark, and laid his snares for the seizure of his victim under cover of the night.

This evening certain new schemes had found birth in his active mind; he was impatient that the victim tarried, when his brain was alive with thoughts of how to effect a more speedy capture.  He leaned against the wall, close by the gate as was his wont when awaiting Sue, smiling grimly to himself at thought of the many little subterfuges she would employ to steal out of the house, without encountering—­as she thought—­her watchful guardian.

A voice close behind him—­speaking none too kindly—­broke in on his meditations, causing him to start—­almost to crouch like a frightened cat.

The next moment he had recognized the gruff and nasal tones of Adam Lambert.  Apparently the blacksmith had just come from the wood through the gate, and had almost stumbled in the dark against the rigid figure of his mysterious lodger.

“Friend, what dost thou here?” he asked peremptorily.  But already Sir Marmaduke had recovered from that sudden sense of fear which had caused him to start in alarm.

“I would ask the same question of you, my friend,” he retorted airily, speaking in the muffled voice and with the markedly foreign accent which he had assumed for the role of the Prince, “might I inquire what you are doing here?”

“I have to see a sick mare down Minster way,” replied Lambert curtly, “this is a short cut thither, and Sir Marmaduke hath granted me leave.  But he liketh not strangers loitering in his park.”

“Then, friend,” rejoined the other lightly, “when Sir Marmaduke doth object to my strolling in his garden, he will doubtless apprise me of the fact, without interference from you.”

Adam Lambert, after his uncivil greeting of his lodger, had already turned his back on him, loath to have further speech with a man whom he hated and despised.

Like the majority of country folk these days, the blacksmith had a wholesale contempt for every foreigner, and more particularly for those who hailed from France:  that country—­in the estimation of all Puritans, Dissenters and Republicans—­being the happy abode of every kind of immorality and debauchery.