“I am serious now, Sir John. We are risking our necks here; it may be no mere supper-party and a trifling loss at cards. You are young—and, then, you have been in other lands. And yet, after all, I am speaking to you as though you were a boy.” For the moment he could only look at her, for she was so very lovely and so womanly that it was not in a man’s nature not to look. “I am in the dark,” he said, at last. “Are you afraid of the dark?” “I have dared it before—for the sake of adventure.” She still stood regarding him with her great eyes, so liquid, so mysterious, and perhaps a little sad. John Gore saw her press something to her bosom, and when she took her hand away he saw that it was a little silver crucifix hung by a chain about her neck. Her lips moved as though she were repeating some Latin prayer. “Fides sanctissima, Maria beatissima, Pater-noster in cœlo.” And then she swept forward toward the room, and John Gore followed her lest she should think him afraid. The room was quite small, panelled with dark oak, and with a fire burning upon the open hearth at one end. A long table stood in the centre. About it were seated some half a score men, and at the head thereof, in a great leather-backed chair, Coleman the Jesuit, chaplain to the Duchess of York. My Lord Gore exchanged glances with Hortense. “It was you, then, most magical Dian, playing porter at the door. I wondered what had become of our friend here. Had I known—” And he laid a hand over his heart. Hortense turned her head for an instant with an audacious flash of the eyes at John Gore. “I will not betray him, but he wished to help a woman find a key that she had not dropped, gallant Sir John!” And the look she gave him would have made the greatest epicure push his plate aside and talk. Father Coleman, infamous or sainted Coleman, as men were soon to call him, sat at the head of a table that was covered, not with papers and epistles, but with dishes of fruit, wineglasses, bottles, comfits, and spiced cakes. The gentlemen about it appeared to have easy consciences and pleasant thoughts. They were debonair, familiar, talkative, very much in the grace of pleasure. The panelling of the room was fanatical and austere, yet the Duchess’s chaplain had cheerful cheeks and vivacious eyes, and bore himself with that easy-flowing worldliness that carries a clever priest into the intimate life of palaces. It might have been nothing more than a gathering of lords and gentlemen who gossiped over their wine, comparing their views, and exchanging the ordinary news of the day. There appeared to be no elaboration of secrecy, no self-conscious sense of urgent peril. They ladled out punch, or filled their wineglasses, smiling across the table at one another, and listening to little pieces of scandal with the ingenuous cheerfulness of country ladies over their dishes of tea.