“What can be done? which way shall we go?” said Dudley, appealing to his attendant. The man looked around and gravely shook his head. “I see no plan of escape unless we struggle through the crowd,” he replied despondingly, “and yet there is but your lordship and my humble self to protect the Lady Jane, and the press threatens to be great.” The artisan who had made a show of holding Dudley’s horse, while he concealed the ring and as many of the jewels which had dropped from the lady’s hair as he could purloin during the short time that she had been left alone with him, in the sleeve of his jerkin—now slipped the bridle over his arm, and came up the steps so far as its length would permit. “If I might advise, fair sir,” he said, doffing his cap, and concealing a large emerald that had before escaped him, with his foot, as he spoke. “If I might make bold to give an opinion, three stout men are enough to cover the retreat of one woman any day. Your gallant self and my worshipful friend here, to say nothing of the man before you, who lacks not both tough bone and sinew in a fair fight, and the noble horse, which I take it, is worth at least two men, having a fine knack, as I but now witnessed, of scattering a crowd with his hoofs. Well now, fair sir, supposing you mount this noble nag and push a way through the crowd, while my worshipful friend and humble self follow at his heels with the lady between us. Oh, this does not jump with the lady’s humor, I see,” continued the man without breaking the thread of his speech, as the Lady Jane drew closer to her companion and murmured in an affrighted voice, “no, no Dudley—keep you with me or I shall die with terror else.” Dudley answered by a gentle pressure of the arm clinging to his, and the man went on, as we have said, regardless of the interruption. “Well, if she does not fancy the cut of my face, perhaps the black charger there will have better taste. Shall I mount and clear a path for you? It is not often that I sit on a crimson saddle with housings of velvet and gold—but there is an old saying or a new one, it matters not which, that if you ‘put a beggar on horseback he will ride’—I must not say exactly where in the presence of this lady, but to such a journey a passage through this crowd of hooting scoundrels would be child’s play—shall I mount, fair sir? you see the fight is getting nearer and there will be hot work anon.” As the man finished speaking, he dropped his sheepskin cap quite by accident, and displayed considerable awkwardness in picking it up again. For a person rather shabbily dressed he certainly was somewhat fastidious in replacing it jauntily on one side of his head; but in the process a large emerald was sent, with a dexterous movement of the fingers, flashing down the sleeve of his jerkin, which probably had some connection with this elaborate display of taste.