She had passed an evening not without excitement, for her grandmother’s searching and persistent inquiries into Prue’s mysterious behavior were not to be evaded, and some kind of explanation was inevitable. So, ingeniously substituting Captain de Cliffe, the emissary of King James, for Captain Freemantle, the highwayman, Peggie admitted that Prue and he had met "in the North," that after his arrest she had visited him in Newgate Prison, and that although now an outlaw and fugitive, steeped in Jacobite plots and charged with state secrets and compromising documents, he had played an important part in her recovery of the queen’s necklace. In fact, she had contrived, without desperately straining the truth, to surround Robin with an aura of heroism and loyalty that had enlisted the old countess’ sympathy for him, almost to the extent of preparing her to sanction Prue’s marriage. Having skilfully wrought her up to this point. Peggie had retired, leaving her revelations to work upon Lady Drumloch’s long-dormant but far from extinct passion for the cause which had robbed her of husband, sons and worldly possessions, and left her nothing for the consolation of her declining years but unrecognized devotion to the most ungrateful of dynasties. Too excited to think of bed, the cousins were still eagerly exchanging confidences, when Prue stopped abruptly and listened. Peggie was hurrying on with her story, but Prue checked her with a warning hand. "Hark, Peggie, did you hear that? Was it not some one knocking at our door?" Peggie listened, and the knocking was repeated. She threw open the window, and thrusting her head out, withdrew it after a brief investigation, with the announcement that there was a man in the street, looking up at their lighted window. "Only one man?" queried Prue. "Can it be Robin?" "I think not," said Peggie; "it does not seem tall enough—this man is—there is the knocking again—what shall we do?" "Something has happened to Robin!" cried Prue, hastily throwing a cloak about her. "I must go down and see what is the matter." "I’ll come with you," cried Peggie, impelled partly by curiosity, and partly by the impulse to protect her cousin. They ran down together, and at the door paused to take counsel. It was no uncommon thing in those days for the "Mohawks" to batter thus at quiet citizens’ doors and mistreat the person who answered their summons, or even, if a woman, to carry her off, shrieking and struggling. "Who is there?" Prue demanded through the closed door. "It is I, Steve Larkyn," a voice replied. "Oh! Mistress Brooke, I beseech you open the door; they have taken my master!" Prue flung the door open, and there stood Steve, ghastly pale in the broad moonlight. "They have taken your master? Then what are you doing here, alive and unhurt?" she cried passionately.