"Aye, what?" came suddenly in Darrell's voice. He stood in the doorway with a fierce and angry frown on his face. A moment later he was across the room and laid his hand on Phineas. "Do you want another cropping of your ears?" he asked. "Do your will on me," cried the fanatic. And sweeping away his lanky hair he showed his ears; to my horror they had been cropped level across their tops by the shears. "Do your will," he shrieked, "I am ready. But your hour comes also, yea, your cup shall soon be full." Darrell spoke to him in low stern tones. "It may be more than ears, if you will not bridle your tongue. It's not for you to question why the King comes or goes." I saw Jonah's face at the door, pale with fright as he looked at the two men. The interest of the scene grew on me; the talk of Dover seemed to pursue me strangely. "But this young man," pursued Phineas, utterly unmoved by Darrell's threat, "is not of you; he shall be snatched from the burning, and by his hand the Lord will work a great deliverance." Darrell turned to me and said stiffly: "This room is yours, sir, not mine. Do you suffer the presence of this mischievous knave?" "I suffer what I can't help," I answered. "Mr Tate doesn't ask my pleasure in his coming and going any more than the King asks Mr Tate's in his." "It would do you no good, sir, to have it known that he was here," Darrell reminded me with a significant nod of his head. Darrell had been a good friend to me and had won my regard, but, from an infirmity of temper that I have touched on before, his present tone set me against him. I take reproof badly, and age has hardly tamed me to it. "No good with whom?" I asked, smiling. "The Duke of York? My Lord Arlington? Or do you mean the Duke of Monmouth? It is he whom I have to please now." "None of them love Ranters," answered Darrell, keeping his face stiff and inscrutable. "But one of them may prefer a Ranter to a Papist," laughed I. The thrust told, Darrell grew red. To myself I seemed to have hit suddenly on the key of a mystery. Was I then a pawn in the great game of the Churches, and Darrell another, and (to speak it with all due respect), these grand dukes little better? Had Phineas Tate also his place on the board where souls made the stakes? In such a game none is too low for value, none too high for use. Surely my finger was on the spring! At least I had confounded Darrell; his enemy, taking my help readily enough, glared on him in most unchristian exultation, and then, turning to me, cried in a species of fierce ecstasy, "Think not that because you are unworthy you shall not serve God. The work sanctifies the instrument, yea, it makes clean that which is foul. Verily, at His hour, God may work through a woman of sin." And he fixed his eyes intently on me. I read a special meaning in his words; my thoughts flew readily to the Cock and Pie in Drury Lane.