throat of the bag sagged down, and a gold
piece jangled on the floor. Carew started as if all his nerves had
leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a
flash. Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its
spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and left, blew
the candle out.

A little while he stood and listened in the dark; a little while his
feet went to and fro in the darkness. The wind cried in the chimney. Now
and then the casements shivered. The timbers in the wall creaked with
the cold, and the boards in the stairway cracked. Then the old he rat
came back to his rind, and his mate came out of the crack in the wall,
working her whiskers hungrily and snuffing the smell of the candle-drip;
for there was no sound, and the coast of rat-land was clear.

CHAPTER XXX

AT THE FALCON INN

And then there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald.

So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.

But over London came a gale that made the chimneys rock; and after it
came ice and snow, sharp, stinging sleet, and thumping hail, with
sickening winds from the gray west, sour yellow fogs, and plunging rain,
till all the world was weary of the winter and the cold.

But winter could not last forever. March crept onward, and the streets
of London came up out of the slush again with a glad surprise of
cobblestones. The sickly mist no longer hung along the river; and
sometimes upon a breezy afternoon it was pleasant and fair, the sun
shone warmly on one's back, and the rusty sky grew bluer overhead. The
trees in Paris Garden put out buds; the lilac-tips began to swell; there
was a stirring in the roadside grass, and now and then a questing bird
went by upon the wind, piping a little silver thread of song. Nick's
heart grew hungry for the woods of Arden and the gathering rush of the
waking water-brooks among the old dead leaves. The rain beat in at his
window, but he did not care for that, and kept it open day and night;
for when he wakened in the dark he loved to feel the fingers of the wind
across his face.

Sometimes the moonlight through the ragged clouds came in upon the
floor, and in the hurry of the wind he almost fancied he could hear the
Avon, bank-full, rushing under the old mill-bridge.

Then one day there came a shower with a warm south wind, sweet and
healthful and