“No, it is impossible,” he whispered to himself. “Was she not born on the feast of the Holy Innocents?” A big heart in a frail body. She came to die, this tired little lamb, really of neglect and loneliness, when she was no more than fifteen. Emotional pietists have declared that she was found dead with her head resting on the Bible. So short-sighted people can mistake for a book the Good Shepherd’s knee. James II The City clocks were chiming four in the starry chill of a December morning as the King and his two attendants hurried down Whitehall stairs to the river. A boat, bespoken hours earlier by his valet Abbadie, who was in waiting for the party, lay ready off the public steps. These, for an obvious reason, had been chosen in preference to the privy stairs, and the result seemed to justify the precaution. The fugitives were not observed or followed, it appeared--unless any significance attached to the form of a sleeping loafer, sprawled heavily over a baulk of timber hard by--and in any case they were all prepared, if challenged, to assume the rôle of belated citizens taking boat after a frolic. The two oars, proved men, were, if not in the actual secret of the escape, sufficiently near it to act in all things with quiet and dispatch. The embarkation proceeded noiselessly, and Sir Edward Hales, the last of the party, was about to step on board, when a remark, _sotto voce_, from one fellow to the other arrested his attention. He paused, his foot on the gunnel, and quickly demanded an explanation. “Why, see, your honour,” said the man in a low voice, “you’re over-late, and the tide’s at the slack. With a pull of thirty miles before us and a heavy boat, it’s odds but we meet the flow this side Greenwich.” “What, then, waterman?” “We shan’t fetch Gravesend before daylight, that’s all.” Sir Edward, being a faithful Papist and Jacobite, cursed ecumenically. Ex-Lieutenant of the Tower, he had only just been dispossessed of his post, a significant one, by dictate of the usurper, and Fate, he felt, might have spared him these lesser vexations. It was important above all things at this pass to get the King bestowed under cover of darkness in the vessel that awaited him at the river-mouth. “Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply. The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said--“two oars and the sculls.” Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr. Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice sounded behind him: “Here’s at your service, master.”