Ranelagh itself was shut up as they stepped ashore, all its lights were out and the hackney coachmen and chairmen gone with their last fares; and of that night's entertainment--which was sure to have been a great one in rivalry to its neighbour and opponent at Vauxhall--nothing was left but the shouting figures of those on the other bank, and, perhaps, a dead man on the grass of the marshes, with a sword-thrust through his lungs and his wide-staring eyes gazing up at the moon. It seemed, therefore, that they must walk to Kensington, since no conveyance was to be found here. "Not that the distance is much," said Bertie Elphinston, who had before now walked at nights from Wandsworth and Chelsea to the Square, simply to gaze on the house that enshrined the woman he had loved so much; perhaps also to see the place where the man dwelt whom he meant to kill when the opportunity should arise--"but 'tis the hour that grows so late. If they have gone home at once from the gardens without being disturbed by any of the police agents, she must be housed by now--and--and--I cannot see her again." "At least you can wait. If not to-day, then to-morrow you can meet, surely. All trace of us is lost now, we shall never go back to Wandsworth--we must send the landlady our debt by some sure hand--a change of clothes and hiding place will put us in safety again. And as for messages, why, Archibald will convey them." "Archibald!" exclaimed the other with a start. "Archibald! Heavens! we had forgotten!--what have we been thinking of? He may be taken too." "Taken! Archibald taken! Oh, Bertie, why should that be?" "Why should it be! Rather ask, why should it not be? Do you think that tiger's whelp who has set the law on us will spare him? No, Simeon Larpent means to make a clean sweep of all at once; his wife's old lover, that lover's friend, and the priest who knows so much of his early life and all his secrets, plots and intrigues against first one and then the other, Jacobite and Hanoverian alike. I tell you, Archibald is in as great a danger as we are!" and he strode on determinately as he spoke.