“We had better travel at once,” he said, when they had talked over every detail; “we can take her in a closed coach. And the nurse and her man can come with us; they are both trustworthy people. You say that there are only a gardener and his wife at Thorn? They must be pensioned and discharged.” “Yes, no one else.” “We must have the girl mewed up before Jack comes back. I shall be able to deal with him. He must not know where we have hidden her.” “No; but should he—” “Prove obstinate! We must find a substitute, or pack him off to sea again. The man has a roving disposition. But listen—in your ear, Nan: I have discovered some one who has taken a sudden liking to Captain John.” “Who?” “Guess.” “Not poor Barbara—she does not count.” “No, no; but Hortense.” My lady looked at him with open eyes. “Hortense! Why, she has only seen him perhaps twice in her life. And then—?” “His Majesty? Oh, Mr. Charles is—well, her banker. It would be like Hortense; it is the blood, and the southern fire in her.” “But how do you know this?” He flipped her playfully on the chin. “How long have I lived in the world, Nan, and how much do I know about women?” XXI A blustering, cheerless wind beat up over the hills as John Gore rode the last five miles of a three days’ journey, and saw the vague glimmer of the distant city clinging to the loops of the river Thames. Scudding clouds made the sky cold and full of a gray hurrying unrest, though it was splashed toward the west with stormy gouts of gold. John Gore rode over the heathlands, with the furze-bushes shivering as the wind swished through them; and the sandy road was dry and adrift with dust, although the sky looked so wet and sullen. The servant behind him on the cob kept a sharp eye cocked on the hollows of the heath and the knolls of furze, and nursed his blunderbuss for comfort, though his face looked as red and as round as the sunny side of an apple. Here and there clumps of stunted hollies jostled each other, their whisperings making the evening seem doubly gray and dreary. An unhallowed dusk was creeping over the landscape—an unhallowed dusk that made travellers imagine footpads lurking behind the thorn-bushes or the furze. As they trotted downhill a solitary horseman came creeping up a side track, with his cloak blowing about him and his beaver over his nose. John Gore had a hand ready for a pistol, and the man Tom began to nudge the butt of his blunderbuss against his knee. Yet the stranger appeared more scared of them than they of him, for he went skimming like a swallow into the dusk, itching for his own chimney glow and the warm side of a safely barred door. John Gore had come by an instinctive distrust of the man Tom’s forefinger. He pulled up, and sent him ahead. “I shall be safer at your back, Tom, with that tool of yours ready to roar like a boy at the sight of the birch.”