"Friend," he said, "if we are both King's men we have no leisure for quarrel, however much our fingers may itch. What is your name, valiant?" The serving-man scowled at him for a moment; then his frown faded as he faced the smile and the bright, wild eyes of Halfman. "My name is Thoroughgood," he answered, and he added, civilly enough, as if conscious of some air of gentility in his companion, "John Thoroughgood, at your service." "A right good name for a right good fellow, if I know anything of men," Halfman approved. "And I take it that you serve a right good lady." "My lady is my lady," Thoroughgood replied, simply. "None like her as ever I heard tell of." Halfman endeavored by dexterous questionings to get some further information than this of the Lady of Harby from her sturdy servant, but Thoroughgood's blunt brevity baffled him, and he soon reconciled himself to tramp in silence by his guide. So long as he remembered anything he remembered that passage through the park, the sweet smell of the wet grass, the waning splendors, russet and umber, of October leaves, the milky blueness of the autumn sky. This was, indeed, England, the long, half-forgotten, yet ever faintly remembered, in places of gold and bloodshed and furious suns, the place of peace of which the fortune-seeker sometimes dreamed and to which the fortune-maker chose to turn. The place of peace, where every man was arming, where citizens were handling steel with unfamiliar fingers, and where a rover like himself could not hope to let his sword lie idle. It was as he thought these thoughts that a turn of the road brought him face to face with Harby Hall, and all the episodes of a busy, bloody life seemed to dwindle into insignificance as he crossed the moat and passed with John Thoroughgood through the guarded portals and found himself once again in the shelter of the great hall.