he summoned her woman, and bade her follow by
post on the morrow. The landlord she rewarded with a ring worth twenty
times the value of the service, and was led by him through a side door
into the innyard.

Here she found three horses, one equipped with the pillion on which she
was to ride behind a burly stableboy. The other two were mounted by
a couple of stalwart and well-armed men, one of whom carried a
funnel-mouthed musketoon with a swagger that promised prodigies of
valour.

Wrapped in her cloak, she mounted behind the stable-boy, and bade him
set out and take the road to Denham. Her dream was at an end.

Master Quinn, the landlord, watched her departure with eyes that
were charged with doubt and concern. As he made fast the door of the
stableyard after she had passed out, he ominously shook his hoary head
and muttered to himself humble, hostelry-flavoured philosophies touching
the strange ways of men with women, and the stranger ways of women with
men. Then, taking up his lanthorn, he slowly retraced his steps to the
buttery where his wife was awaiting him.

With sleeves rolled high above her pink and deeply-dimpled elbows stood
Mistress Quinn at work upon the fashioning of a pastry, when her husband
entered and set down his lanthorn with a sigh.

"To be so plagued," he growled. "To be browbeaten by a slip of a
wench--a fine gentleman's baggage with the airs and vapours of a lady of
quality. Am I not a fool to have endured it?"

"Certainly you are a fool," his wife agreed, kneading diligently,
"whatever you may have endured. What now?"

His fat face was puckered into a thousand wrinkles. His little eyes
gazed at her with long-suffering malice.

"You are my wife," he answered pregnantly, as who would say: Thus is
my folly clearly proven! and seeing that the assertion was not one that
admitted of dispute, Mistress Quinn was silent.

"Oh, 'tis ill done!" he broke out a moment later. "Shame on me for it;
it is ill done!"

"If you have done it 'tis sure to be ill done, and shame on you in good
sooth--but for what?" put in his wife.

"For sending those poor jaded beasts upon the road."

"What beasts?"

"What beasts? Do I keep turtles? My horses, woman."

"And whither have you sent them?"

"To Denham with the baggage that came hither this morning in the company
of that very fierce gentleman who was in such a pet because we had no
horses."

"Where is he?" inquired the hostess.

"At dice with those