"Where have you been all day?" she cried roughly, hustling him into the house--so violently that he stumbled on the threshold. "You don't deserve your food either," she continued, shaking him fiercely, "playing truant all day! But you shall have it, if only to tantalize that craven fool yonder. Where have you been, eh? You will stop at home in future, do you hear? This is your place--inside these four walls--until this business is over. You remember that, my lad, or it will be the worse for you!" Simon Gridley and two men, whom the boy did not know, were in the kitchen, sitting dour and silent over the remains of a meal. They looked up on the boy's entrance, but took no further notice of him. The woman set food before him, scolding all the while, and then went off to her work in the back premises. The boy had little heart to eat; but presently he found occasion while Simon was talking to the two strangers (who were brothers, of the name of Edgington, ex-troopers and weavers of Bradford) to secrete part of his meal inside his jacket. Mistress Gridley, when she came back, looked sharply at what he had left; but the boy had eaten so little that her suspicions were not aroused, and she flounced away with the platter, bidding him remain indoors and sit where he was. She had scarcely gone when Luke entered and joined the party by the window, and there ensued much solemn jubilation over the morning's work and the peculiar judgments vouchsafed to the neighborhood; and particularly over the reported arrival at Ripon of Lieutenant-General Cromwell, with forces which might be trusted to give a good account of the Scotch army. Jack, sitting trembling on a stool in a corner of the fireless chimney-place, heard their sanguine predictions and shuddered. He knew Cromwell by name, and dimly associated him with Marston Moor, and the sad night which had seen his father ride home to die. The kitchen grew to the lad's eyes as he listened full of dark shadows and forebodings of fate. The men who loomed between him and the window seemed to increase in size. Only the purpose he had in his mind, and the necessity of action if he would pursue it, saved him from breaking down and bursting into childish weeping. By dint of fixing his mind on this, however, he steadied himself; and by-and-by, choosing a moment when the talk was loud, stole across the room to a tub in which the oatcake was kept. Ordinary the lid lay loose upon it: now, to his huge disappointment, he found it locked! Baffled, and more than half inclined to cry, he wandered back to his place and resumed his seat on the floor, affecting to be engaged in playing with two billets of wood. In reality his thoughts were keenly at work. The cheese and cake he had secreted were scarcely worth carrying to his brother. Where could he get more?