This time she yielded to a spur that earlier her passion had made her disregard. Between such evils there could be no choice. She looked into his livid, gleaming face, distorted by his anguish and anxiety. “I ... I can trust you in this? If I trust you ... you will bear me safely home? You swear it?” “As God’s my witness!” he sobbed in his impatience. There was an end to her resistance now. More: she displayed a sudden urgency that matched his own. “Quick! Quick, then!” she panted. “Ah!” He drew a deep breath of thankfulness, snatched up hat and cloak from the chair where he tossed them, and drew her across the room by the wrist, of which he still retained his grip. And then, just as they reached the door, it was thrust open from without, and the tall, graceful figure of the Duke of Buckingham, his curled fair head almost touching the lintel, stood before them, a flush of fevered expectancy on his handsome face. In his right hand he held his heavily feathered hat: his left rested on the pummel of the light dress rapier he was wearing. The pair recoiled before him, and Holles loosed her wrist upon the swift, instinctive apprehension that here he was like to need his hands for other things. His grace was all in glittering satin, black and white like a magpie, with jewels in the lace at his throat and a baldric of garter blue across his breast. A moment he stood there at gaze, with narrowing eyes, puzzled by something odd in their attitudes, and looking from Miss Farquharson’s pale, startled loveliness to the stiff, grim figure of her companion. Then he came slowly forward, leaving the door wide behind him. He bowed low to the lady without speaking; as he came erect again it was to the Colonel that he addressed himself. “All should be here, I think,” he said, waving a hand towards table and sideboard. Holles half-turned to follow the gesture, and he stood a moment as if pondering the supper equipment, glad of that moment in which to weigh the situation. Out there, in the hall, somewhere just beyond that open door, would be waiting, he knew, Buckingham’s four French lackeys, who at their master’s bidding would think no more of slitting his throat than of slicing the glazed capon on the sideboard yonder. He had been in many a tighter corner than this in his adventurous life, but never before had there been a woman on his hands to hamper him and at the same time to agonize and numb his wits with anxiety. He thanked Heaven for the prudence which had silenced his impulse to bid Buckingham stand aside when he had first made his appearance. Had he acted upon that, there would very likely have been an end of him by now. And once there was an end of him, Nan would lie entirely at the Duke’s mercy. His life had come suddenly to matter very much. He must go very warily. The Duke’s voice, sharp with impatience, roused him: “Well, booby? Will you stand there all night considering?” Holles turned.