'Before God,' he laughed, 'that is one way to have information about a quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.' 'Oh, alack!' Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands. 'Well, we are prisoners till he come again,' her brother said good-humouredly. 'But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.' She said-- 'If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.' He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably. He said very slowly-- 'Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old Duchess's?' She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his fist. 'The Queen's Highness was such a child,' she said. 'She cannot remember. I have lived very godly since.' 'I will do what I can to save you,' he said. 'Let me hear about it, as, being prisoners, we may never come off.' 'You!' she cried out. 'You who stole my wedding portion!' He laughed deviously. 'Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.' 'You lie!' she said. 'You gar'd me do it.' The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled. 'Come upon the grass,' he said. 'I will not be heard to say more than this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly brother.' Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his elbow. 'Tell me truly,' she said, 'shall I see the Court or a prison?... But you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yard-man. I would become such a liar as thou to come away from here.' 'Sister,' he said, 'this I tell you most truly: that this shall fall out according as you obey me and inform me'; and, because he was a little the taller, he leaned over her as they walked away together. * * * * * On the fourth day from then they were come to the great wood that is to south and east of the castle of Pontefract. Here Lascelles, who had ridden much with his sister, forsook her and went ahead of the slow and heavy horses of that troop of men. The road was broadened out to forty yards of green turf between the trees, for this was a precaution against ambushes of robbers. Across the road, after he had ridden alone for an hour and a half, there was a guard of four men placed. And here, whilst he searched for his pass to come within the limits of the Court, he asked what news, and where the King was.