‘Why, no,’ said he.  ’Certainly not.  I will do no such thing, indeed.’

‘It would be a great favour, sir,’ I pleaded.

‘It would be an unpardonable blunder,’ he replied.  ’What?  Give you a letter of introduction? and when the police come, I suppose, I must forget the circumstance?  No, indeed.  Talk of it no more.’

‘You seem to be always in the right,’ said I.  ’The letter would be out of the question, I quite see that.  But the lawyer’s name might very well have dropped from you in the way of conversation; having heard him mentioned, I might profit by the circumstance to introduce myself; and in this way my business would be the better done, and you not in the least compromised.’

‘What is this business?’ said Romaine.

‘I have not said that I had any,’ I replied.  ’It might arise.  This is only a possibility that I must keep in view.’

‘Well,’ said he, with a gesture of the hands, ’I mention Mr. Robbie; and let that be an end of it!—­Or wait!’ he added, ’I have it.  Here is something that will serve you for an introduction, and cannot compromise me.’  And he wrote his name and the Edinburgh lawyer’s address on a piece of card and tossed it to me.

CHAPTER XXI—­I BECOME THE OWNER OF A CLARET-COLOURED CHAISE

What with packing, signing papers, and partaking of an excellent cold supper in the lawyer’s room, it was past two in the morning before we were ready for the road.  Romaine himself let us out of a window in a part of the house known to Rowley:  it appears it served as a kind of postern to the servants’ hall, by which (when they were in the mind for a clandestine evening) they would come regularly in and out; and I remember very well the vinegar aspect of the lawyer on the receipt of this piece of information—­how he pursed his lips, jutted his eyebrows, and kept repeating, ’This must be seen to, indeed! this shall be barred to-morrow in the morning!’ In this preoccupation, I believe he took leave of me without observing it; our things were handed out; we heard the window shut behind us; and became instantly lost in a horrid intricacy of blackness and the shadow of woods.

A little wet snow kept sleepily falling, pausing, and falling again; it seemed perpetually beginning to snow and perpetually leaving off; and the darkness was intense.  Time and again we walked into trees; time and again found ourselves adrift among garden borders or stuck like a ram in the thicket.  Rowley had possessed himself of the matches, and he was neither to be terrified nor softened.  ‘No, I will not, Mr. Anne, sir,’ he would reply.  ’You know he tell me to wait till we were over the ’ill.  It’s only a little way now.  Why, and I thought you was a soldier, too!’ I was at least a very glad soldier when my valet consented at last to kindle a thieves’ match.  From this, we easily lit the lantern; and thenceforward, through a labyrinth of woodland paths, were conducted by its uneasy glimmer.  Both booted and great-coated, with tall hats much of a shape, and laden with booty in the form of a despatch-box, a case of pistols, and two plump valises, I thought we had very much the look of a pair of brothers returning from the sack of Amersham Place.