"Never! He has nothing to do with my daughter. Is she not a Malherb? Hang the lying, infamous scoundrel! Take him from my sight. Let all such be hanged. I would say it if he was my son!" A moment later he rode away full charged with frenzy: while Lee and Knapps passed into the War Prison. CHAPTER X A GOD OF GLASS It had been Lovey Lee's part to keep guard during the operations beneath her cottage, and, on the morning of discovery, while Knapps was underground and John Lee lay in a heavy sleep, she stood at her door and scanned the morning. Her mind was on money; within eight-and-forty hours she would receive her reward; and now every glittering dewdrop of the dawn shone beneath her eyes like a gold piece. Then it was that another scintillation--that of steel--struck upon Lovey's sight, and she saw the flash of bayonets and the gleam of red coats. They approached swiftly across the Moor, and, divining their significance, the old woman instantly fled out at the rear of her cottage, and climbed and crept with amazing speed into the lonely fastnesses of North Hisworthy Tor above Prince Town. Here, safe as a fox in earth, she remained close hidden until nightfall, and then started for her holt at Hangman's Hollow. The fate of the men she had deserted troubled her not at all. To have informed them of danger would have been to lessen her own chance of escape by a full minute, and she had felt no temptation to take such risk. Now was all lost but her liberty; and as she stalked along the nocturnal Moor, like a dark and gigantic bird, the miser swore aloud and cursed fortune at every step. A live thing in the path reminded her that she had not eaten food for six-and-thirty hours; stooping, therefore, she picked up a luckless frog, tore it asunder, and stayed her stomach with its quivering hind legs. Never had Lovey fallen into a temper more ferocious and brutal. Months of patient fraud were thrown away, and she found herself actually out of pocket upon the venture. This reflection maddened her. In a delirium of disappointment she strode forward, and once, when an owl screeched out of the coppice at Tor Royal, she screeched back at it like a fury, and swung her long arms, and cursed the stars because they looked like good money scattered and wasted upon the sky. She sank into a calenture of crazy wrath; frantically she longed for some object upon which to vent her mania of disappointed hope; and every moment she hastened unconsciously nearer a victim.