“We will have done with play-acting, if you please,” said the drawer, addressing his master, but, strangely enough, in the same authoritative voice. “After all, is it not a little vulgar, and a little cowardly?” The astonished landlord spluttered out a string of oaths. But he was almost inarticulate with anger and bewilderment. A frank sparkle of amusement showed at the same time in Will Jackson’s eyes. The transformation of his voice was extending to his face; nay, to his person and his bearing too. Where a minute ago there had been stolid inanimation and indifference, were intelligence and vivacity. Where there had been lumpishness and awkwardness of gait, were graciousness and breeding. The fellow still wore his coarse rustic clothes, his face was still bedaubed with dirt, but he was no longer the same person. The landlord was slowly beginning to recognise the fact. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded. It seemed that his transformed serving-man was on the point of telling him, when the poor lady, who seemed just now to be acting in a kind of delirium, stayed him suddenly by placing her two hands on the leathern sleeve of his jerkin. “No, no, no!” she cried; “it must not be. Whatever the cost, it must not be.” “Think of your husband’s life, madam,” said the triumphant landlord. Neither the man nor the woman paid heed to him now, however. There seemed some far graver matter between them. “At all costs,” the landlord heard the woman say to his serving-man in a hoarse whisper, “I implore you to be wise, to be discreet. It is not for yourself alone I beseech you; think, oh! think of all that it means.” Her voice, too, was changing. While she spoke, it lost something of its wildness. It still throbbed with its passion, but above it was a yearning tenderness, a maternal solicitude that dominated it completely. “Nay,” said Will Jackson, with his strange, cool smile again creeping out of his eyes. “What’s the odds? I am weary to death of this farce; it is become intolerable. And, after all, we are in the hands of God, are we not? There is but our destiny to trust to.” “But must we not shape it?” said the woman. “You may mitigate it, or enhance it, by your unremitting prudence. I beseech you to remember, all is not lost. There are still those that are your friends. Be wary, be discreet, I pray you.” It distinctly seemed to the landlord’s eager ears that the woman had as great a solicitude for this fellow as her husband--nay, an even greater one. For was she not apparently prepared to sacrifice her lord, rather than Will Jackson should reveal the secret between them?