Without ado I opened the door, and stood before them. At first I thought she looked afraid, and this made me say what I should not have dared to say otherwise. "Constance," I said, "I could not come before, but I have loved you all the time, even as I told you I should." Her eyes were lifted to mine as if in great wonder, then I saw the tears well up in them; but they were not tears of sorrow. "You are not angry with me, are you?" I said. And then she burst out sobbing upon my shoulder, while I, unheeding Master Day and his wife, strained her to my heart. We did not stay long at the cottage. I gave Master Day enough money to meet his needs for some time to come, and then Constance and I walked to Goodlands together along the silent, lonely road whither she had come. I will not write of all the things we spoke about during that long journey. Enough to say that she had escaped from the king's palace as my father had told me, and had made her way to Goodlands, which she entered by a secret known only to herself, and to the faithful farmer who occupied the kitchen part of the house and looked after the Goodlands estate. Here she was able to remain unmolested. The entrance to the house, she told me, was by a secret underground passage, the opening of which could only be discovered with great difficulty. Here, moreover, were rooms in which her forefathers had been hidden in the days of Queen Mary, the secret of which had defied all searchers. It was here she had hidden Father Solomon, whose real name was John Walters, and her sister Dorcas, and it was from here she had sent her sister to Holland to meet her husband. She told me, moreover, that this old man, who claimed to be the father of Lucy Walters, had been driven wellnigh mad because of his daughter's shame, and that he had left his wife because she encouraged her child in her evil ways. He had, moreover, become friendly with Sir Charles Denman, who had given him the right to live in the lonely house. For years he had been a student of the occult sciences, in order, he said, to find out the hiding place of the marriage contract between his daughter and the king, and it was here that her sister came, after she, in a fit of religious frenzy, had sought to take the life of General Monk. Constance told me, moreover, that she had been taught to fear this old man; yet did she visit him for her sister's sake, on the night when we first met. Whether the marriage contract was genuine, or whether it had been forged by the old man or no, she could not tell, neither did she know where he was now. Directly after her sister had escaped to Holland, he also had disappeared; but before he went he declared that he would yet see his daughter owned as the king's wife, while her son should be king of England.