Here he drew himself up, summoned a voice from his chest a storey or two deeper, and asked in magisterial tone: 

’Whence comest thou, woman? and on what business gaddest thou so late?’

’I am come from visiting at a friend’s house, and am now almost on my own farm,’ answered Dorothy.

The man turned to Tom, and Dorothy began to regret she had brought him:  he was trembling visibly, and his mouth was wide open with terror.

‘See,’ she said, ’how thy gruff voice terrifieth the innocent!  If now he should fall in a fit thou wert to blame.’

As she spoke she put her hand in her pocket, and taking from it her untoothsome plum, popped it into Tom’s mouth.  Instantly he began to make such strange uncouth noises that the sentinel thought he had indeed terrified him into a fit.

‘I must get him straightway home.  Good-night, friend,’ said Dorothy, and giving Dick the rein, she was off like the wind, heedless of the shouts of the sentinel or the feeble cries of pursuing Tom, who, if he could not fight, could run.  Following his mistress at great speed, he was instantly lost in the darkness, and the sentinel, who had picketed his horse in a neighbouring field, sat down again on the parapet of the bridge, and began to examine all that Dorothy had said with a wondrous inclination to discover the strong points in it.

Having galloped a little way, Dorothy drew bridle and halted for Tom.  As soon as he came up, she released him, and telling him to lay hold of Dick’s mane and run alongside, kept him at a fast trot all the way to his mother’s house.

The moon had risen before they reached it, and Dorothy was therefore glad, when she dismounted at the gate, to think she need ride no further.  But while Tom went in to rouse his mother, she let Dick have a few bites of the grass before taking him into the kitchen—­lest the roundheads should find him.  The next moment, however, out came Tom in terror, saying there was a man in his mother’s closet, and he feared the roundheads were in possession.

‘Then take care of thyself, Tom,’ said Dorothy; and mounting instantly, she made Dick scramble up into the fields that lay between the cottage and her own house, and set off at full speed across the grass in the moonlight—­an ethereal pleasure which not even an anxious secret could blast.

Through a gap in the hedge she had just popped into the second field, when she heard the click of a flint-lock, and a voice she thought she knew ordering her to stand:  within a few yards of her was again a roundhead soldier.  If she rode away, he would fire at her; that mode of escape therefore she would keep for a last chance.  The moon by this time was throwing an unclouded light from more than half a disc upon the field.

Keeping a sharp eye upon the man’s movements, she allowed him to come within a pace or two, but the moment he would have taken Dick by the bridle she was three or four yards away.