“Sancta Maria! is the offence so flagrant?” “You might as well go to the King’s levee with a dirty face, sir. Don’t guffaw; I’m in earnest. Richards has orders to get rid of all the husks.” The sea-captain fingered the gold tags. “Being a prodigal, I will put up with such husks as these. I suppose I may be preferred before Tom Richards?” My lord took the cloak from him casually, as though he had not noticed the gold chains with their knots of pearls. “Hallo! these are worth saving, after all. I’ll keep them myself, Jack. Give a thing, and take it back again. That is philosophy of a sort, according to Hobbs.” He laughed, pulled out a silver-handled clasp-knife from a pocket, and cut the gold curbs away from the cloth. “For what we have saved, let us be thankful. It is not always wise to lend other people either your opinions or your wardrobe, much less your purse.” John Gore had picked up the cloak again. “Three, are there? There must have been four once. Look at the tear, there—in the cloth. Curious; I should not have noticed it before.” My lord took the cloak from him and examined it with a careless air, making use of one corner to hide a yawn. “The mark of the beast, Jack. Tom Richards’ fingers have been at work here, or I know nothing of human nature. Well, the fellow must have his pickings. If one worries about a small man’s petty pilferings one ought not to have the insolence to be a courtier. We are all sooted by the same chimney. Another glass of wine, Jack? No? Well, let’s to bed.” They parted with a hand-shake and a light word or two upon the stairs, words that hid in either case the deeper impulses beneath. In my lord’s heart there was something of scorn, something of dismay, and the fierce uneasiness of a man who loves to look only upon the more flattering features of his soul. There seemed nothing in the incident to shake his confidence, and yet it had shaken him as a light wind sways a mighty elm that is rotten at the roots. A cloak, so much mere cloth, which he had hidden away and forgotten! Yet the thing had brought back visions of an autumn night, of betrayal and of anger, of passionate reproaches and of swift violence in the dark. What though he solaced himself with the oath that death had judged between the fortunes of two swords? The sin of treachery had been his. The blood-guilt remained, and no sophistry and no well-wishing to himself could wipe the stain away.