I felt that it was high time for me to know against what I was to fight. Not that I was any way scared. I do not think I thought about that at all, so pleased was I at being where I was, and specially anxious that no one should come to help, so as to share with me any of the credit that was my due from Miss Irma. Agnes Anne, indeed, was afraid of what she was going to hear. For as yet she had been told nothing definite. But then she was tenfold more afraid of "King George"--mostly, I believe, because it had been made a kind of fetish in our house, and the terrible things that would happen if we meddled with it continually represented to us by our mother. Finally, we arranged that "King George" should be set in the angle of the oriel window, the muzzle pointing to the sky, and that in the pauses of the tale, I should keep a look-out from the watch-tower. "It is my brother Louis--Sir Louis Maitland--whom they are seeking!" Miss Irma made this statement as if she had long faced it, and now found nothing strange about the matter. But I think both Agnes Anne and I were greatly astonished, though for different reasons. For my sister had never imagined that there was any danger worse than the presence of "King George" in the window corner, and as for me, the hope of helping to protect Miss Irma herself from unknown peril was enough. I asked for no better a chance than that. "We have a cousin," she continued, "Lalor Maitland is his name, who was in the rebellion, and was outlawed just like my father. He took up the trade of spying on the poor folk abroad and all who had dealings with them. He was made governor of the strong castle of Dinant on the Meuse, deep in the Low Countries. With him my father, who wrongly trusted him as he trusted everybody, left little Louis. I was with my aunt, the Abbess of the Ursulines, at the time, or the thing had not befallen. For from the first I hated Lalor Maitland, knowing that though he appeared to be kind to us, it was only a pretence. "He entertained us hospitably enough in a suite of rooms very high up in the Castle of Dinant above the Meuse river, and came to see us every day. He was waiting till he should make his peace with the English. Then he would do away with my brother and----" She paused, and a kind of shuddering whiteness came across the girl's face. It was like the flashing of lightning from the east to the west that my grandmother reads about in her Bible--a sort of shining of hatred and determination like a footstep set on wet sand. "But no," she added, "he would not have married me, even if he had kept me shut up for ever in his Castle of Dinant on the Meuse!"