e,
with,--

'Now, greasy fingers! What are you staring at?'

'The devil!' the landlord muttered, beginning to tremble.

'Then let me look at him!' the man retorted, and he turned on his stool.

He started, finding me standing over him.

'At your service!' I said grimly. 'A little time and it will be the
other way, my friend.

CHAPTER VII. A MASTER STROKE

I have a way with me which commonly commands respect; and when the
landlord's first terror was over and he would serve me, I managed to get
my supper--the first good meal I had had in two days--pretty comfortably
in spite of the soldiers' presence. The crowd, too, which filled the
room, soon began to melt. The men strayed off in groups to water their
horses, or went to hunt up their quarters, until only two or three were
left. Dusk had fallen outside; the noise in the street grew less. The
firelight began to glow and flicker on the walls, and the wretched room
to look as homely as it was in its nature to look. I was pondering for
the twentieth time what step I should take next, and questioning why
the soldiers were here, and whether I should let the night pass before
I moved, when the door, which had been turning on its hinges almost
without pause for an hour, opened again, and a woman came in.

She paused a moment on the threshold looking round, and I saw that she
had a shawl on her head and a milk-pitcher in her hand, and that her
feet and ankles were bare. There was a great rent in her coarse stuff
petticoat, and the hand which held the shawl together was brown and
dirty. More I did not see: for, supposing her to be a neighbour stolen
in, now that the house was quiet, to get some milk for her child or
the like, I took no farther heed of her. I turned to the fire again and
plunged into my thoughts.

But to get to the hearth where the goodwife was fidgeting the woman had
to pass in front of me; and as she passed I suppose that she stole a
look at me from under her shawl. For just when she came between me and
the blaze she uttered a low cry and shrank aside--so quickly that she
almost stepped on the hearth. The next moment she turned her back to
me, and was stooping whispering in the housewife's ear. A stranger might
have thought that she had trodden on a hot ember.

But another idea, and a very strange one, came into my mind; and I
stood up silently. The woman's back was towards me, but something in her
height, her shape, the pose of her head hidden as