you who are the true lover and the
gentleman; and I am naught but a selfish churl with my face in my own
trencher!" he burst out, wringing my hand yet again. "'Tis as you say;
yet I will not be driven from this; for aught you have told me to prove
it otherwise, Madge has yet to choose between us, and she shall have
that choice, fairly and squarely, and knowing that you love her, before
we three go apart again."

I smiled, and tried hard to keep the heart-soreness out of my reply.

"As for that, my lad, I have had my stirrup-cup long since, and have
drained it to the dregs with a wry face, as an old man must when a young
man brews for him. But if the priest--"

Jennifer had resumed his pacing sentry beat, and at this juncture a most
singular thing happened. Though we were sealed in, as I have said, from
all the outer world with no crack nor cranny for a peephole, a blinding
flash of lightning, blue and ghastly, came suddenly to fill the whole
cellar with its vivid glare.

"Good Lord!" says Richard, clapping his hands to his eyes; "where did
that come from?"

I was wholly at a loss for a moment. Then I remembered that there was,
or had been in my boyhood days, a narrow, iron-barred window in the
farther end of the wine cellar, opening beneath that other window of the
great south room where I had climbed to spy upon the conspirators on the
night of Captain John Stuart's visit to Appleby. So it chanced that when
another flash came I was looking straight over Dick's head at the place
in the farther arching of the vault where the little window should be.

The momentary glare showed me the low square of the window opening, and
framed for a flitting instant therein a face of most devilish malignity
peering in upon me with foxy-fierce eyes; the face, to wit, of Gilbert
Stair's lawyer-factor.

In a twinkling the vision was gone, and in the space between the flash
and the crash there was a sound as of a wooden shutter slamming in
place. Dick heard the noise without knowing the cause of it, being so
far beneath the window as to see nothing but the lighting of the glare.

"What was that?" he demanded, when the thunder gave him leave.

"'Twas our trapper clapping the shutter on the window over your head,"
said I. "He was looking in to see if we were ripe for hanging."

"'Tis no time for riddles; what mean you?"

"I mean that we shall have a file of redcoats down upon us as soon as
ever Mr. Owen Pengarvin can give the alar