res it with our Royal Master?"

"Why, it stands this way, sir, as I take it," whispered the visitor.
"His Majesty must either fly the country or reach the army of the Scots,
which he has no liking for, or raise the eastern counties and risk
another battle. As it is, we have come safe out of Oxford, where Fairfax
and the arch-rebel Cromwell are closing upon the city, and the king has
ridden behind me after I had trimmed off his pointed beard, and made him
look as much like a servant as is possible to his sainted person. I left
him an hour ago after we had left Deeping, for I came on here to see if
you could receive him, not according to his rank, but as a plain guest,
with the name of Thomas Williams; for there are those about who might be
meddlesome, and His Majesty can only tarry for two or three days,
waiting for a message from the Scots generals, to be brought by a trusty
hand. I had feared that His Majesty would have overtaken me, for my
horse cast a shoe, and came limping along for a mile or more, till at
the smithy yonder by the roadside I found a farrier."

"Bring my dear friend Mr. Thomas Williams on with you," said Sir
Christopher loudly, as the door opened and a serving man came out; "he
shall be welcome for old times' sake when we were at college together,
and tell him I will not have him put up at the inn while there is a bed
and a bottle at Stolham Manor."

Now neither Sir Christopher nor this visitor, who was the King's Groom
of the Chamber, knew that the King, hearing the sound of horsemen behind
him, had ridden past and turned down a bye-road, which all the same led
him to Stolham; still less did they imagine that he was actually in the
old manor house while they were talking there in the hall; because they
had no notion of what had happened in the room where Mistress Dorothy
was twanging the lyre, and the two young cousins were footing to the
tune of Valparaiso Bay.

While the children were in the very midst of a figure and Dick was
snapping his fingers, and Cicely was making the grand _chasse_, Mistress
Dorothy, glancing up from her music towards the window, had seen a pale
face looking through the pane. She was not a woman to scream or to
faint, for she was a quiet, staid, middle-aged person of much
experience, and had lived in London, where she went to Court more than
once with Sir Christopher and her kinswoman Dame Burroughs; so she kept
on playing, and walked a little nearer to the window. The m