"Peace, man," he said. "Peace! Is this a time to be bickering? Let us be clear before we separate, what is to be done with this man. For my part, I am not for letting him go." "Nor I," said Smith, speaking almost for the first time. The others, lately so hot and impassioned, looked at the speakers and at one another with a sort of apathy. Only Ferguson cried violently, "Nor I, by----! Nor I. We are many, and what is one life?" "Quite so, Mr. Ferguson," Charnock retorted. "But will you take the life?" The plotter drew back as he had drawn back before. "It is everybody's business," he muttered. "Then will you take part in it? You are the first to condemn. Will you be one to execute?" Ferguson moistened his lips with his tongue, and, swallowing with an effort, looked shiftily at me and away again. The sweat stood on his face. For me, I watched him, fascinated; watched him, and still he did not answer. "Just so," said Charnock, at last. "You will not. And that being so, is there anyone else who will? If not, what is to be done?" "Put him in a lugger," Keyes cried, "at the bridge; and by morning----" "He wall be taken off at the Nore," Cassel answered scornfully. "And you too if you think to get off that way. There are more Billops in the Pool than the Billop who gave up Ashton." "Gag him and leave him here." "And have him found by the messengers to-morrow morning?" Cassel answered. "As well and better, call a chair, and pay the chairmen, and bid them take him to the Secretary's office with our compliments." "Well, if not here, in one of the other pens. Ferguson knows plenty." The woman who had come in with Smith laughed. "That might answer," she said, "if his sweetheart were not here. Do you think she would leave him to starve?" There was a general stir and muttering as the men turned to the girl. "Pooh," said one, "it is Ferguson's girl." "And your spy's sweetheart," the woman repeated. The girl lifted her head and showed the room a face pale, weary, and dull-eyed. "He is nothing to me," she said. And the men would have believed her; but the woman, with a swift, cat-like movement, seized her wrist and held it. "Nothing to you, my girl, isn't he?" she cried. "Then you have the fever or the small-pox on you! One, two, three----" Her face flaming, the girl sprang up and snatched away her hand. The woman laughed--and how I hated her! "He is nothing to you, isn't he?" she said in a mocking tone. "Yet what will you not give me to save him, my chick? What will you not give me to see him safe out of this house? What----?" "Peace, peace!" cried Charnock. "Time is everything, and we are wasting it. Unless we would be taken, every man of us, we should be half-way to Romney Marsh by morning." "Will you leave him to me!" said Smith suddenly. "Leave him?" "Ay. Or better, let me have two minutes' talk with him here, and if he comes to my way of thinking, I will answer for him."