Tom obeyed him with rather a shamefaced grin, for thirty miles south of Shirleys his blunderbuss had exploded at two in the afternoon, the road running through a wood with a stray cow pushing through the hazel-bushes. A scattering of slugs and buckshot had pattered into the grass beside John Gore’s horse; for Tom’s forefinger had a habit of crooking itself for comfort round the trigger when the road wound into shady bottoms. And if an owl screeched at dusk along a hedge-row, Thomas would give such a start in the saddle that it was a mere turn of the coin whether the flint would come sparking on the powder in the pan. It was growing very gray in the west when they came by Edgeware toward Hyde Park, and soon saw the spires of Westminster like faint streaks against a fainter sky. The lights that were looking up in the gathering twilight had a heartening, warming twinkle. Tom slung his blunderbuss by a strap over his shoulder, and began to look buxom and bold enough—as though he already sniffed a hot supper and felt the ale-mug tickling his beard. They came without event toward St. James’s, Charing Village, and Whitehall, and all that sweet savor of courtliness where great gentlemen and roguish “maids of honor” drank wine and let the warmth thereof mount into their eyes. To John Gore the whole purlieu of the palaces had a mystic glow—a glow that the romance of the heart throws out like a June sun over an Old-World garden. His thoughts were very different from those of red-faced Tom, who may have associated the ogle of a pair of merry eyes with the glint of a pewter pot; for John Gore forgot a twenty-mile hunger at a glimpse of the dim trees of St. James’s and the imagined gleam of Rosamond’s Pool. And hunger in a strong man is an earnest pleader. Therefore, romance had the greater glory, and even so the queen thereof—a girl in a black dress, with white bosom and white arms, and eyes so sombre that the sorrow of the world might have sunk therein. The lower windows of my Lord Gore’s house were aglow as John Gore and his man rode up St. James’s Street with a homeward clatter over the stones. The iron gates leading into the court-yard at the side of the house stood open, and in the yard itself several coaches were standing without their horses, and a couple of sedan-chairs in one corner with the poles piled against the wall. Yet though there was as much talking going on as in the parlor of a river-side tavern, there was not such a thing as a servant to be seen.