Master Busy, we must admit had but little saintliness left in him now. Let us assume that--as he explained afterwards--he was not immediately aware of Mistress Charity's presence, and that his own sense of propriety and of decorum had been drowned in a cataract of tar water. Certain it is that a volley of oaths, which would have surprised Sir Marmaduke himself, escaped his lips. Had he not every excuse? He was dripping from head to foot, spluttering, blinded, choked and bruised. He shook himself like a wet spaniel. Then hearing the sound of a smothered exclamation which did not seem altogether unlike a giggle, he turned round savagely and perceived the dim outline of Mistress Charity's dainty figure. "The Lord love thee, Master Hymn-of-Praise," she began, somewhat nervously, "but you have made yourself look a sight." "And by G--d I'll make that young jackanapes look a sight ere I take my hand off him," he retorted savagely. "But what were you ... hem! what wert thou doing up in the elm tree, friend Hymn-of-Praise?" she asked demurely. "Thee me no thou!" he said with enigmatic pompousness, followed by a distinctly vicious snarl, "Master Busy will be my name in future for a saucy wench like thee." He turned towards the house. Mistress Charity following meekly--somewhat subdued, for Master Busy was her affianced husband, and she had no mind to mar her future, through any of young Courage's dare-devil escapades. "Thou wouldst wish to know what I was doing up in that forked tree?" he asked her with calm dignity after a while, when the hedges of the flower garden came in sight. "I was making a home for thee, according to the commands of the Lord." "Not in the elm trees of a surety, Master Busy?" "I was making a home for thee," he repeated without heeding her flippant observation, "by rendering myself illustrious. I told thee, wench, did I not? that something was happening within the precincts of Acol Court, and that it is my duty to lie in wait and to watch. The heiress is about to be abducted, and it is my task to frustrate the evil designs of the mysterious criminal." She looked at him in speechless amazement. He certainly looked strangely weird in the semi-darkness with his lanky hair plastered against his cheeks, his collar half torn from round his neck, the dripping, oily substance flowing in rivulets from his garments down upon the ground. The girl had no longer any desire to laugh, and when Master Busy strode majestically across the rustic bridge, then over the garden paths to the kitchen quarter of the house, she followed him without a word, awed by his extraordinary utterances, vaguely feeling that in his dripping garments he somehow reminded her of Jonah and the whale. CHAPTER X AVOWED ENMITY The pavilion had been built some fifty years ago, by one of the Spantons of Acol who had a taste for fanciful architecture.