With these words she cried out for her servants in a voice full of horror and grief, and the first person to answer her cry was Cymlin Swaffham. He came in like some angry young god, his ruddy face and blazing eyes breathing vengeful inquiry. Matilda went to his side, clung to his arm, pointed to the dead man on the hearth and the domineering figure of the sheriff above it, and cried, "Cymlin, Cymlin, send him away! Oh, ’twas most unmercifully done!" "Sir," said Cymlin, "you exceed your warrant. Have you arrested Stephen de Wick?" "The man has run, Mr. Swaffham, and madame there knows it." "You have nothing to do with Lady Matilda. If the house has been searched, your business here is finished. You can go." "Mr. Swaffham, if you don’t know, you ought to be told, that Anthony Lynn—just dead and gone—was a double-dyed Royalist scoundrel; and I and my men here will swear to it. He confessed it, joyed himself in the death struggle against the Lord Protector; we all heard the man’s own words;" and the sheriff touched with the point of his boot, the lifeless body of Anthony Lynn. "Touch off!" cried Matilda. "How dare you boot the dead? You infinite scoundrel!" "Sheriff, your duty is done. It were well you left here, and permitted the dead to have his rights." "He is a traitor! A King’s man! A lying Puritan!" "He is nothing at all to us, or to the world, now. To his Master above he will stand or fall; not to you or me, or even to the law of England." Then he turned to Matilda and led her to a sofa, and comforted her; and the men-servants came and took away the dead body and laid it, as Anthony wished, on his old master’s bed. Lady Jevery went weeping to her room, and the sound of lamentation and of sorrow passed up and down the fine stairway, and filled the handsome rooms. But the dead man lay at peace, a smile of gratified honour on his placid face, as if he yet remembered that he had, at the last moment, justified himself to his conscience and his King. And in the great salon, now cleared of its offending visitors, Cymlin sat comforting Matilda. He could not let this favourable hour slip; he held her hand and soothed her sorrow, and finally questioned her in a way that compelled her to rely, in some measure, upon him. "Stephen was here yesterday?" he asked. "Part of the day. He left here at four in the afternoon." "Yet the mail-rider, under oath, swore this morning that it was Stephen who robbed the mail." She laughed queerly, and asked, "What did Yupon Slade say?" "Yupon proved that he was in the tinker’s camp at Brentwick from sunset to cock-crowing. Half-a-dozen men swore to it. People now say it was Stephen and Frederick Blythe. But if it was not Stephen, who was it?" and he looked with such a steady, confident gaze into Matilda’s face, that she crimsoned to her finger-tips. She could not meet his eyes, and she could not speak.