“Why; what danger is that, Mr. Sheppard?” said I, very innocently.

“Why—­a rising!” he said.  “Has not my Lord Essex told you?”

“Ah! yes!” said I, “I had forgot.” (This was wholly false.  He had told me once or twice at least that there was danger of this.  This had been a month ago; and his object had been to persuade me that they had been telling the truth.)

“I saw some fellows as we came in,” I said.

“Those are the malcontents,” he said.  “There are not more than a very few now, who go about and brag.”

I assented.

“By the way,” said my Lord Essex to Shaftesbury who looked at him heavily, “I spoke with my Lord Russell a week ago.  You know my Lord Russell, Mr. Mallock?”

I said that I did not.

“Well; I had hoped he would have been here to-night.  But he is gone down to the country—­to Stratton—­where he has his seat.”

He talked a while longer of my Lord Russell; and I saw that he wished me to believe that my Lord was of their party:  whence I argued to myself that was just what he was not; but that they wished to win him over for the sake of his name, perhaps, and his known probity. (And, as the event shewed, I was right in that conjecture.)

Two or three of them were still talking together in this strain, and while I listened enough to tell me that it was nothing very important that they said, I was observing my Lord Shaftesbury:  and, upon my heart!  I was sorry for the man.  Three years ago he was in the front of the rising tide, in the full blast of popularity and power; he had so worked upon the old Popish Plot and the mob, that he had all the movement with him:  His Majesty himself was afraid of him, and was forced to follow his leading.  Now he was fallen from all this; the Court-party had triumphed because he had so overshot his mark, and here was he, in this poor quarter, in the house of a man that would have been nothing to him five years ago, forced to this very poor kind of conspiring for his last hopes.  He sat as if he knew all this himself:  his eyes strayed about him as we talked, and there were heavy pouches beneath them, and deep lines at the corner of his nose and mouth.  It was this man, thought I, who was so largely responsible for the death of so many innocents—­and all for his own ambition!

Presently I heard His Grace of Monmouth spoken of.  It was Mr. Sheppard who spoke the name; and in an instant I was on the alert again.  What he said fell very pat with what I was thinking of my Lord Shaftesbury.

“I declare,” cried Mr. Sheppard, once more talking at me very evidently, “that His Grace of Monmouth breaks my heart.  I was with his Grace a fortnight ago.  His loyalty and love for the King are overpowering.  I had heard”—­(this was a very bold stroke of poor Mr. Sheppard)—­“I had heard that some villainous fellows had proposed to His Grace—­oh! a great while ago, in April, I think—­that an assault should be made upon the King; and that His Grace near killed one of them for it.  Yet His Majesty will scarce speak to him, so much he distrusts him.”