Five minutes later Master Peasegood was fast asleep, and the casement-frames vibrated to his snore. Volume 2, Chapter XII. HOW THE GAME WENT AGAINST MASTER COBBE. A very different scene was enacting at the Pool-house on that very evening. Sir Mark had spent the day mostly out of doors, and had sought out the founder, who, finding that he made no further allusions to his child, but turned the conversation to the works, readily showed him the busy tasks in progress, where, about a mile from the house, men were digging ironstone from out of a pit. Then on the way back he pointed with pride to the deep hole in the face of a precipitous mass of stone, where the shell had torn for itself a place in which to explode, and then rent out the rock in splintered fragments, which lay about side by side with the pieces of iron of which the shell was composed. "Does that hole go in far?" said Sir Mark, eyeing it curiously. "Goodness knows," was the reply. "Deep enough. That shot would destroy part of an enemy's stronghold, or drive in the side of a ship. But come, and you shall see them get ready a furnace for my next gun." Sir Mark followed, and watched the process as layers of ironstone were alternated with charcoal from a mighty heap that lay hard by. A visit to one of the powder-sheds came next, after Sir Mark had left outside his sword, dagger, and spurs. "Are you not too particular?" he said, rather disdainfully. "Not a bit," was the bluff reply. "Would'st have his Majesty's Ambassador blown into fragments, like one of my shells? I am none too particular," he said, as he saw his companion shudder. "I have had so many accidents here that you must allow me to know what is best." After this Sir Mark seemed disposed to shirk the visit, but he made an effort, and walked through the place more manfully, looking with curious eyes at the dull black grains, or masses of composition in an unfinished state. "How would his Majesty like a run through here?" said the founder, with a chuckle. "Powder will always have an ill savour in his nostrils." It was with no little sense of relief that Sir Mark found himself outside, close by the shed where the great howitzer had been placed, and at his solicitation the founder readily consented to have the gun out once more, and with boyish eagerness devoted himself to test the powers of the piece and its bursting shells, when loaded after Gil's own fashion. At last the founder and his guest had returned, partaken of the evening meal, which Mace dispensed with the calmness of one whose heart was quite at rest; and finally she had retired to find occasion to take Janet to task for being giggling and whispering in the shrubbery with one of Sir Mark's gaily-dressed men, for by dint of careful drying and smoothing, the traces of the plunge into the mill-race had been made to disappear.