King sat himself down by his master’s bed. “A better hedge against your enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of sea ’twixt here and France. Would to Heaven you had done as I advised ere you set foot in this ungrateful land.” “The omission may be repaired,” said Sir Walter. Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir Walter had been reconsidering De Chesne’s assurance touching my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, and he had come to conclude—the more readily, perhaps because it was as he would have it—that De Chesne was right; that to break faith with them were no such great matter after all, nor one for which they would be called upon to suffer. And so, now, when it was all but too late, he yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and consented to save himself by flight to France. King was to go about the business of procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need of desperate haste, as was shown when presently orders came to Brentford for the disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at Salisbury, desired that Sir Walter should be conveyed to his own house in London. Stukeley reported this to him, proclaiming it a sign of royal favour. Sir Walter was not deceived. He knew the reason to be fear lest he should infect the Tower with the plague by which he was reported stricken. So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London, and safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his loving friend and kinsman. Manourie’s part being fulfilled and the aim accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment by bestowing upon him the second diamond—a form of eminently portable currency with which the knight was well supplied. On the morrow Manourie was gone, dismissed as a consequence of the part he had played. It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this—a very well informed and injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to forfeit the knight’s confidence that behind his back Sir Walter secretly concerted means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to trust him? Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he considered King’s unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him of his kinsman’s general neediness, remembered past events that shed light upon his ways and nature, and began now at last to have a sense of the man’s hypocrisy and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned in regard to him precisely as he had reasoned in regard to Manourie. The fellow was acquisitive, and therefore corruptible. If, indeed, he was so base that he had been bought to betray Sir Walter, then he could be bought again to betray those who had so bought him. “Nay, nay,” said Sir Walter easily. “It is not lack of trust in you, my good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and knowing as I do the upright honesty of your character I feared to embarrass you with things whose very knowledge must give you the parlous choice of being false to that office or false to me.”