He said it with a quiet steadfastness in which I seemed to detect an undercurrent of strenuous meaning. I stopped, and in my turn looked long at him. What did he mean? Volney's words came to my mind. I began to piece together rumours I had heard but never credited. I knew that even now men dreamed of a Stuart restoration. If Arthur Elphinstone of Balmerino were one of these I knew him to be of a reckless daring mad enough to attempt it. "My Lord, you say I might turn a king," I repeated slowly. "'Tis more like that I would play the knave. You speak in riddles. I am no guesser of them. You must be plain." Still he hung back from a direct answer. "You are dull to-night, Kenn. I have known you more gleg at the uptake, but if you will call on me to-morrow night I shall make all plain to you." We were arrived at the door of his lodgings, a mean house in a shabby neighbourhood, for my Lord was as poor as a church mouse despite his title. I left him here, and the last words I called over my shoulder to him were, "Remember, I promise nothing." It may be surmised that as I turned my steps back toward my rooms in Arlington Street I found much matter for thought. I cursed the folly that had led me to offer myself a dupe to these hawks of the gaming table. I raged in a stress of heady passion against that fair false friend Sir Robert Volney. And always in the end my mind jumped back to dally with Balmerino's temptation to recoup my fallen fortunes with one desperate throw. "Fraoch! Dh 'aindeoin co theireadh e!" (The Heath! Gainsay who dare!) The slogan echoed and reechoed through the silent streets, and snatched me in an instant out of the abstraction into which I had fallen. Hard upon the cry there came to me the sound of steel ringing upon steel. I legged it through the empty road, flung myself round a corner, and came plump upon the combatants. The defendant was a lusty young fellow apparently about my own age, of extraordinary agility and no mean skill with the sword. He was giving a good account of himself against the four assailants who hemmed him against the wall, his point flashing here and there with swift irregularity to daunt their valiancy. At the moment when I appeared to create a diversion one of the four had flung himself down and forward to cling about the knees of their victim with intent to knife him at close quarters. The young man dared not shorten his sword length to meet this new danger. He tried to shake off the man, caught at his white throat and attempted to force him back, what time his sword still opposed the rest of the villains.