The King stood awaiting them with an absolute indifference, as though he were hardly conscious of their presence, let alone their errand. He did not speak and he did not move. Indeed, so unconcerned did he appear, that his features seemed to relapse into those of Will Jackson. They grew utterly blank and destitute of emotion; and this, in unison with his dirty, stained countenance and mean dress and appearance, caused the first of the soldiers to enter the room, Captain Culpeper, hardly to regard him at all. He turned to the man in the bed. The face of Lord Farnham, worn with illness as it was, and racked with pain, betrayed the strong excitement under which he was labouring. His dress and the manner in which he lay were far more calculated to attract attention to him than the King, whose garb and impassivity were wonderful foils to his true condition. For a moment Captain Culpeper, who apparently was not at all familiar with the King’s appearance, looked at Lord Farnham a little doubtfully, and in that moment Lady Farnham’s strange resolve was born. As a cat notes the movements of a mouse, had the unhappy lady noted those of the King’s enemies. Of so vastly different a nature was she to the helpless landlord downstairs in the kitchen, that in lieu of his paralysis at the approach of the terrible crisis she had a preternatural keenness in all her faculties. Her mind was perfectly clear, whatever the stress under which it was labouring. Her wits were roused to a desperate acuteness. Her whole being was possessed and dominated by one awful thought. The King’s life was at stake; the King’s life must be saved. The soldiers did not move an inch but what the lady saw them. An instant of indecision and she was prepared to act upon it. Captain Culpeper looked doubtfully a moment at Lord Farnham lying in the bed. The next, and the woman had flung herself passionately forward and buried her head beside him among his pillows. “Oh, my King, my King!” she cried, putting her arms about her husband’s neck. “It were better you had died rather than this. It is indeed the end!” The soldiers stood off respectfully. The grief of the woman was so piteous, that it pierced even their rude souls. Lady Farnham continued to weep convulsively upon her husband’s neck, calling him by the King’s name, and pouring forth the cries of her despair. Captain Culpeper, who had never seen Charles, and had only the vaguest ideas of what he was like, did not suspect that the real King stood, in a servant’s livery, behind him. The woman’s actions in those tragic circumstances were so in keeping with them, and to the unpractised eyes of the soldiers the man in the bed was the only person in the room who could in the least fulfil their ideas of what a monarch was like, that the deception, once it was set up, was not difficult to maintain.