Anne clasped her hands; Charles had truly interfered with good cause.

“I had all arranged,” he continued; “my uncle would have given you a hearty welcome, and made our peace with my father, or if not, he would have left us all his goods, and secured my career.  What call had that great lout, with a wife of his own too, to come thrusting between us?  I thought I should make short work of him, and give him a lesson against meddling—­great unlicked cub as he was, while I had had the best training at Berlin and Paris in fencing; but somehow those big strong fellows, from their very clumsiness, throw one out.  And he meant mischief—­yes, that he did.  I saw it in his eyes.  I suppose his sulky rustic jealousy was a-fire at a few little civilities to that poor little wife of his.  Any way, when he bore me down like the swing of a windmill, he drove his sword home.  Talk of his being innocent!  Why should he never look whether I were dead or alive, but fling me headlong into that pit?”

Anne could not but utter her eager defence, but it was met with a sinister smile, half of scorn, half of pity, and as she would have gone on, “Hush! your pleading only fills up the measure of my loathing.”

Her heart sank, but she let him go on, listening perhaps less attentively as she considered how to take him.

“In fact,” he continued, “little as the lubber knew it, ’twas the best he could have done for me.  For though I never looked for such luck as your being out in the court at that hour, I did think the chance not to be lost of visiting the garden or the churchyard, and there were waiting in the vault a couple of stout Normans, who were to come at my whistle.  It seems that when I came tumbling down in their midst, senseless and bleeding like a calf, they did not take it quite so easily as your champion above, but began doing what they could for me, and were trying to staunch the wound, when they heard a trampling and a rumbling overhead, and being aware that our undertaking might look ugly in the sight of the law, and thinking this might be pursuers, they carried me off with all speed, not so much as stopping to pick up the things that have made such a commotion.  Was there any pursuit?”

“Oh no; it must have been the haymakers.”

“No doubt.  The place was in no great favour with our own people; they were in awe of the big Scot, who is in comfortable quarters in my grave, and the Frenchmen could not have found their way thither, so it was let alone till Mistress Martha’s researches.  So I came to myself in the boat in which they took me on board the lugger that was waiting for us; and instead of making for Alderney, as I had intended, so as to get the knot safely tied to your satisfaction, they sailed straight for Havre.  They had on board a Jesuit father, whom I had met once or twice among the Duke of Berwick’s people, but who had found Portsmouth too hot to hold him in the frenzy of Protestant