I had been playing.  For I had now managed to put my identification beyond a doubt, if Alain should choose to make his inquiries at Aylesbury; and, as if that were not enough, I had added, at an expense of seventy pounds, a clue by which he might follow me through the length and breadth of England, in the shape of the claret-coloured chaise!  That elegant equipage (which I began to regard as little better than a claret-coloured ante-room to the hangman’s cart) coming presently to the door, I left my breakfast in the middle and departed; posting to the north as diligently as my cousin Alain was posting to the south, and putting my trust (such as it was) in an opposite direction and equal speed.

CHAPTER XXII—­CHARACTER AND ACQUIREMENTS OF MR. ROWLEY

I am not certain that I had ever really appreciated before that hour the extreme peril of the adventure on which I was embarked.  The sight of my cousin, the look of his face—­so handsome, so jovial at the first sight, and branded with so much malignity as you saw it on the second—­with his hyperbolical curls in order, with his neckcloth tied as if for the conquests of love, setting forth (as I had no doubt in the world he was doing) to clap the Bow Street runners on my trail, and cover England with handbills, each dangerous as a loaded musket, convinced me for the first time that the affair was no less serious than death.  I believe it came to a near touch whether I should not turn the horses’ heads at the next stage and make directly for the coast.  But I was now in the position of a man who should have thrown his gage into the den of lions; or, better still, like one who should have quarrelled overnight under the influence of wine, and now, at daylight, in a cold winter’s morning, and humbly sober, must make good his words.  It is not that I thought any the less, or any the less warmly, of Flora.  But, as I smoked a grim segar that morning in a corner of the chaise, no doubt I considered, in the first place, that the letter-post had been invented, and admitted privately to myself, in the second, that it would have been highly possible to write her on a piece of paper, seal it, and send it skimming by the mail, instead of going personally into these egregious dangers, and through a country that I beheld crowded with gibbets and Bow Street officers.  As for Sim and Candlish, I doubt if they crossed my mind.

At the Green Dragon Rowley was waiting on the doorsteps with the luggage, and really was bursting with unpalatable conversation.

’Who do you think we’ve ’ad ‘ere, sir?’ he began breathlessly, as the chaise drove off.  ‘Red Breasts’; and he nodded his head portentously.

‘Red Breasts?’ I repeated, for I stupidly did not understand at the moment an expression I had often heard.