-foot. I bowed my head, looking
momently to pay the penalty; but once more my Lord put the swords
aside.

"Let us have a clean breast of it this time, Captain Ireton," he said.
"You know well what you have earned, and nothing you can say will make
it better or worse for you. Was this your purpose in making your
submission to me?"

"It was."

"And you have been a rebel from the first?"

I met the cold anger in the womanish eyes as a condemned man might.

"I have, my Lord--since the day nine years agone when I learned that
your king's minions had hanged my father in the Regulation."

"Then it was a farrago of lies you told me about your adventures in the
western mountains?"

"Not wholly. It was your Lordship's good pleasure to send succors of
powder and lead to your allies, the western savages. I and three others
followed Captain Falconnet and his Indians, and I have the honor to
report that we overtook and exploded them with their own powder cargo."

"And Captain Sir Francis Falconnet with them?"

"I do so hope and trust, my Lord."

He turned short on his heel, and for a moment a silence as of death fell
upon the room. Then he took the Ferara from the table and sought to
break it over his knee; but the good blade, like the cause it stood for,
bent like a withe and would not snap.

"Put this spy in irons and clear the room," he ordered sharply. And
this is how the little drama ended: with the supper guests crowding to
the door; with my Lord pacing back and forth at the table-head; with two
sergeants bearing me away to await, where and how I knew not, the word
which should efface me.

XLIII

IN WHICH I DRINK A DISH OF TEA

Being without specific orders what to do with me, my two sergeant
bailiffs thrust me into that little den of a strong-room below stairs
where I had once found the master of the house, and one of them mounted
guard whilst the other fetched the camp armorer to iron me.

The shackles securely on, I was left to content me as I could, with the
door ajar and my two jailers hobnobbing before it. Having done all I had
hoped to do, there was nothing for it now but to wait upon the
consequences. So, hitching my chair up to the oaken table, I made a
pillow of my fettered wrists and presently fell adoze.

I know not what hour of the night it was when the half-blood Scipio, who
was Mr. Gilbert Stair's body-servant, came in and roused me. I started
up suddenly at his touch, making no doubt