c-chamber."

"Send him here top-speed," Brilliana commanded. With a whisk of
flying skirts Tiffany scuttered back to the house, and Brilliana
turned to Halfman, the laughter in her eyes seeking and finding the
laughter in his.

"Well," she said, "our angling prospers blithely. We have tickled one
fish. Now for the other chub."

Halfman, who had been swaying with silent merriment ever since the
departure of Master Paul, suddenly grew steady again and looked
warnings.

"He asks for another kind of angling, as I gather," he suggested.
Brilliana looked daintily wise.

"As I bait the hook I believe I will land him. It will be rare if I
can make Paul rob Peter while Peter plunders Paul. How dare they be
so close-fisted while the King's flag is flying and England's honor
in peril!"

If she said this with any idea of palliating the possible lawlessness
of her action in the eyes of her companion, she wasted her words.
Halfman had not been so happy since his return to England, not even
in the briskest days of the siege, as he was now in the staging of
this lawless comedy. The old pirate jigged in him at this fair maid's
strategy.

"By St. Nicholas," he swore, "they should be bled white for a brace
of knaves! This, I take it, is your other honor-bankrupt atomy."

XVIII

SERVING THE KING

It was indeed Master Peter Rainham whom Tiffany now brought into the
presence of her mistress, and left there standing and staring. Master
Peter, eyed and appraised by the searching scrutiny of Halfman,
resolved himself into a thick-set, boorish fellow, whose flying
forehead, little, angry eyes, and assertive, yellow teeth made him,
to Halfman's mind, resemble nothing in the world so much as a boar's
head on an ale-house sign. Yet the fellow stood his ground sturdily
enough, and stared at Brilliana with no sense of distress at his
dirty homespun or his dirty hands.

"You sent for me?" he challenged. "Have you changed your mood? I am
ever of the same mind, and will wed when you will."

The wolf look leaped into Halfman's eyes, and the loutish squire's
life was, all unawares, in the greatest peril it had ever fringed.
But Brilliana, intent only on her purposes, beamed on her blunt
suitor as if he had scattered flowers at her feet.

"You are a wonderful wooer," she protested. "But whatever admiration
of your person I may, without unbecoming effrontery, confess, I would
have you to know, plain and square, from this moment, t