She would liked to have wandered into the fields beyond Charing village, but time was passing, and there were things to be remembered. She went straight to her room on reaching home, and, locking the door, opened an oak coffer of which she kept the key. Lying there on a green silk scarf were two pretty little flintlocks, their barrels damascened and the stocks set with silver. She took them out and, sitting on her bed, held them in her lap while she ran the ramrod down the barrels to see that the charges were safely there. The scattering of powder in the pan from the ivory powder-flask should be left till the last moment. Barbara was putting the pistols back in the coffer when she heard voices at the far end of the gallery. It was her mother and Mrs. Jael talking together. Their footsteps came down the gallery, and a hand knocked at the door. “Yes. Who is it?” Mrs. Jael’s voice answered, bland and sweet: “Mistress Barbara, my dear, my lady wishes to see you in her room.” Barbara closed the lid of the coffer, put the keys in her bosom, and went to the door. Mrs. Jael curtesied, never forgetting her good manners. “Will you please go to my lady’s room?” “What does mother want with me?” “Go and see, my dear mistress,” quoth the woman, with an air of motherliness and mystery. Barbara passed up the gallery without locking the door after her, since Mrs. Jael made a pretence of going down the stairs. Yet the woman was back again, with a briskness that did her years credit, so soon as she had heard the closing of my lady’s door. Mrs. Jael appeared wise as to what to do in Barbara’s room, probably because of that peep-hole in the wainscoting of the wall. She went straight to the table where the oak coffer stood, pulled out a bunch of keys from her pocket, and, choosing one marked with a tag of red ribbon, unlocked the coffer and lifted the lid. Mrs. Jael showed no surprise at seeing the pistols lying therein half concealed by the green scarf. She ran a knitting-needle, which she drew from her stocking, down each barrel in turn, holding the pistol close to her ear and listening as she probed it. Then she examined the powder-pans, smiled to herself sweetly, and, putting the pistols back just as she had found them, relocked the coffer and sidled out of the room. XVIII My Lord Gore came to the supper-table in the best of tempers, welding fatherliness, gallantry, and wit into one and the same humor. After a glance at his debonair and handsome face the veriest nighthawk out of Newgate might have declared him a great gentleman, a pillar of the state, and upholder of all chivalry. No man could be more gracious when the wine had no sour edge to it. He could dance a child to the ceiling, laugh like a boy, and make the majority of young maids fall in love with him with a tremor of romance.