“Yet your King does not reign!” said the man, wonderingly, and he wrote.  He wrote the truth about Harry Whittington; for Wogan was looking over his shoulder.

“Did he pay you to keep silence as to his share in the business?” asked Wogan, as the man scattered some sand over the paper.  “There is no word of it in your handwriting.”

The man added a sentence and a figure.

“That will do,” said Wogan.  “I may need it for a particular purpose;” and he put the letter carefully away in the pocket of his coat.  “For a very particular purpose,” he added.  “It will be well for you to convey your party back with all haste to Trent.  You are on the wrong side of the border.”

CHAPTER XX

Wogan went from the parlour and climbed out of the house by the rope-ladder.  He left it hanging at the window and walked up the glimmering road, a ribbon of ghostly white between dim hills.  It was then about half-past twelve of the night, and not a feather of cloud stained the perfection of the sky.  It curved above his head spangled like a fair lady’s fan, and unfathomably blue like Clementina’s eyes when her heart stirred in their depths.  He reached the little footway and turned into the upward cleft of the hills.  He walked now into the thick night of a close-grown clump of dwarf-oaks, which weaved so dense a thatch above his head that he knocked against the boles.  The trees thinned, he crossed here and there a dimpled lawn in the pure starshine, he traversed a sparse grove of larches in the dreamy twilight, he came out again upon the grassy lip of a mountain torrent which henceforth kept him company, and which, speaking with many voices, seemed a friend trying to catch his mood.  For here it leaped over an edge of rock, and here in a tiny waterfall, and splashed into a pellucid pool, and the reverberating noise filled the dell with a majestic din; there it ran smoothly kissing its banks with a murmur of contentment, embosoming the stars; beyond, it chafed hoarsely between narrow walls; and again half a mile higher up it sang on shallows and evaded the stones with a tinkling laugh.  But Wogan was deaf to the voices; he mounted higher, the trees ceased, he came into a desolate country of boulders; and the higher he ascended, the more heavily he walked.  He stopped and washed his face and hands clean of blood-stains in the stream.  Above him and not very far away was the lonely hut.

He came upon it quite suddenly.  For the path climbed steeply at the back, and slipping from the mouth of a narrow gully he stood upon the edge of a small plateau in the centre of which stood the cabin, a little house of pinewood built with some decoration and elegance.  One unglazed window was now unshuttered, and the light from a lantern streamed out of it in a yellow fan, marking the segment of a circle upon the rough rocky ground and giving to the dusk of the starshine a sparkle of gold.  Through the window