he owned he owed to his sharp
sword, his dull conscience, his rogue's luck, and his player's heart.
Why, then, was he going to Harby when he ought to be busy in the
village looking for that house with crimson eaves and the bee-haunted
garden?

He knew well enough, though he did not parcel out his knowledge into
formal answers. In the first place, if the country was bent upon
these civil broils, clearly his intended character of pipe-smoking,
ale-drinking citizen was wholly unsuited to the coming play.
Wherefore, in a jiff he had abandoned it, and now stood, mentally, as
naked as a plucked fowl while he considered what costume he should
wear and what character he should choose to interpret. His sense of
humor tempted him to the sanctimonious suit of your out-and-out
Parliament man; his love for finery and the high horse lured him to
lovelocks and feathers. The old piratical instinct which he thought
he had put to bed forever was awake in him, too, and asking which
side could be made to pay the best for his services. If he must take
sides, which side would fill his pockets the fuller? It was in the
thick of these thoughts that he found himself within a few feet of
the walls of the park of Harby.

The great gates were closed that his boyhood found always open. He
smiled a little, and his smile increased as a figure stepped from
behind the nearest tree within the walls, a sturdy, fresh-looking
serving-fellow armed with a musketoon.

"Hail, friend," sang out Halfman, and "Stand, stranger," answered the
man with the musketoon. Halfman eyed him good-humoredly.

"You do not carry your weapon well," he commented. "Were I hostile
and armed you would be a dead jack before you could bring butt to
shoulder. Yet you are a soldierly fellow and wear a fighting face."

The man with the musketoon met the censure and the commendation with
the same frown as he surlily demanded the stranger's business at the
gates of Harby.

"My business," answered Halfman, blithely, "is with the Lady of
Harby," and before the other could shape the refusal of his eyes into
an articulate grumble he went on, briskly, "Tell the Lady Brilliana
Harby that an old soldier who is a Harby man born has some words to
say to her which she may be willing to hear."

"Are you a King's man," the other questioned, still holding his
weapon in awkward watchfulness of the stranger. Halfman laughed
pleasantly.

"Who but a King's man could hope to have civil speech w