e said, and followed her into the gloom.

Lovel outside stood for a second hesitating. His chance had come. His
foe had gone of his own will into the place in all England where murder
could be most safely done. But now that the moment had come at last,
he was all of a tremble and his breath choked. Only the picture, always
horribly clear in his mind, of a gallows dark against a pale sky and
the little fire beneath where the entrails of traitors were burned--a
nightmare which had long ridden him--nerved him to the next step. "His
life or mine," he told himself, as he groped his way into a lane as
steep, dank, and black as the sides of a well.

For some twenty yards he stumbled in an air thick with offal and
garlic. He heard steps ahead, the boots of the doomed magistrate and the
slipshod pattens of the woman. Then they stopped; his quarry seemed to
be ascending a stair on the right. It was a wretched tenement of wood,
two hundred years old, once a garden house attached to the Savoy palace.
Lovel scrambled up some rickety steps and found himself on the rotten
planks of a long passage, which was lit by a small window giving to
the west. He heard the sound of a man slipping at the other end, and
something like an oath. Then a door slammed violently, and the place
shook. After that it was quiet. Where was the bloody fight that Godfrey
had been brought to settle?

It was very dark there; the window in the passage was only a square of
misty grey. Lovel felt eerie, a strange mood for an assassin. Magistrate
and woman seemed to have been spirited away.... He plucked up courage
and continued, one hand on the wall on his left. Then a sound broke the
silence--a scuffle, and the long grate of something heavy dragged on
a rough floor. Presently his fingers felt a door. The noise was inside
that door. There were big cracks in the panelling through which an eye
could look, but all was dark within. There were human beings moving
there, and speaking softly. Very gingerly he tried the hasp, but it was
fastened firm inside.

Suddenly someone in the room struck a flint and lit a lantern. Lovel set
his eyes to a crack and stood very still. The woman had gone, and the
room held three men. One lay on the floor with a coarse kerchief, such
as grooms wear, knotted round his throat. Over him bent a man in a long
coat with a cape, a man in a dark peruke, whose face was clear in
the lantern's light. Lovel knew him for one Bedloe, a led-captain a