your
sleeve?"

"But of course not! I told you I was vexatiously detained, almost at
your gates. Yes, I had the ill luck to blunder into a disgusting
business. The two rapscallions tumbled out of a doorway under my horse's
very nose, egad! It was a near thing I did not ride them down. So I
stopped, naturally. I regretted stopping, afterward, for I was too late
to be of help. It was at the Golden Hind, of course. Something really
ought to be done about that place. Yes, and that rogue Marler bled all
over a new doublet, as you see. And the Deptford constables held me with
their foolish interrogatories--"

"So one of the fighting men was named Marlowe! Is he dead, too, dead in
another gutter?"

"Marlowe or Marler, or something of the sort--wrote plays and sonnets
and such stuff, they tell me. I do not know anything about him--though,
I give you my word now, those greasy constables treated me as though I
were a noted frequenter of pot-houses. That sort of thing is most
annoying. At all events, he was drunk as David's sow, and squabbling
over, saving your presence, a woman of the sort one looks to find in
that abominable hole. And so, as I was saying, this other drunken rascal
dug a knife into him--"

But now, to Captain Musgrave's discomfort, Cynthia Allonby had begun to
weep heartbrokenly.

So he cleared his throat, and he patted the back of her hand. "It is a
great shock to you, naturally--oh, most naturally, and does you great
credit. But come now, Pevensey is gone, as we must all go some day, and
our tears cannot bring him back, my dear. We can but hope he is better
off, poor fellow, and look on it as a mysterious dispensation and that
sort of thing, my dear--"

"Oh, Ned, but people are so cruel! People will be saying that it was I
who kept poor Cousin George in London this past two weeks, and that but
for me he would have been in France long ago. And then the Queen,
Ned!--why, that pig-headed old woman will be blaming it on me, that
there is nobody to prevent that detestable French King from turning
Catholic and dragging England into new wars, and I shall not be able to
go to any of the court dances! nor to the masque!" sobbed Cynthia, "nor
anywhere!"

"Now you talk tender-hearted and angelic nonsense. It is noble of you to
feel that way, of course. But Pevensey did not take proper care of
himself, and that is all there is to it. Now I have remained in London
since the Plague's outbreak. I stayed with my regi