So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader of all on which he could lay his hands--he read manuscripts in holy friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where the _Magna Folia_ were printed, and he listened tolerantly while the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and behind each other’s backs made bitter and malicious charges of plagiarism or anything else they could think of. To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. “The Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was beginning another: THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY _It falls me here to write of Chastity. The fayrest vertue, far above the rest_.... A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin, panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse. “Wessel,” words choked him, “stick me away somewhere, love of Our Lady!” Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some concern. “I’m pursued,” cried out Soft Shoes. “I vow there’s two short-witted blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw me hop the back wall!” “It would need,” said Wessel, looking at him curiously, “several battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world.” Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly perturbed irony. “I feel little surprise,” continued Wessel. “They were two such dreary apes.” “Making a total of three.” “Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they’ll be on the stairs in a spark’s age.” Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret above. “There’s no ladder.” He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft Shoes mounted, crouched, hesitated, crouched again, and then leaped amazingly upward. He caught at the edge of the aperture and swung back and forth, for a moment, shifting his hold; finally doubled up and disappeared into the darkness above. There was a scurry, a migration of rats, as the trap-door was replaced;... silence. Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the Legend of Britomartis or of Chastity--and waited. Almost a minute later there was a scramble on the stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door. Wessel sighed and, picking up his candle, rose. “Who’s there?” “Open the door!” “Who’s there?”