The old butler shot from out the crowd, as though impelled from a catapult. "Your Honor!" he screamed, "the man as says _I_ plot against a Verney, lies! I that fought with your Honor at Naseby! I that you brought from home with you when Mistress Patricia was a baby, and that has poured your wine from that day to this! I plot with these rapscallions and Roundheads! Your Honor, he lies in his throat!" "Fall into line, Humfrey," said his master quietly; "I will hear you out later, but now, obey me." The watchful eyes of Luiz Sebastian were growing very watchful indeed. "Regulus!" cried Landless. Under cover of a burst of protestation from Regulus, the Turk whispered to the mulatto, "By Allah! this is the slave you would not approach! You said he would die for his master." "He is not of them," returned the other. "St. Jago! if I understand it! But what can it matter? The moon will rise in less than an hour." "Dick Whittington!" cried Landless. There was a moment’s silence, broken by the mulatto, who had stepped out of line, and now stood facing the party from the great house. "I grieve to say, señors," he said in his silkiest tone, "that the poor Dick was but now taken with the fever, and lies in a stupor within his cabin. To-morrow, perhaps, he will be better, and will answer when you call." "That is your cabin, just beyond you there, is it not?" demanded Landless. "Assuredly," with a quick glance. "And what then?" Landless raised his voice to a shout. "Dick Whittington!" "Mother of God! what do you mean?" exclaimed the mulatto. "Your voice cannot reach him, deaf and dumb from the fever, lying in his cabin at the far end of the lane." "Dick Whittington!" again loudly called Landless. A cry arose from the crowd behind the mulatto and between him and his cabin. The next instant there broke through them the figure, bound and gagged, of young Dick Whittington. As he rushed past the mulatto, the latter, with a snarl of fury, grappled with him, but animated with, the strength of despair, the boy, bound as he was, broke from him and rushed to Landless, at whose feet he dropped in a dead faint. Upon the crowd fell a silence so intense that nature herself seemed to have ceased to breathe. Luiz Sebastian, darting glances here, there, and everywhere, from eyes in which doubt was fast growing into certainty, came upon something which told its own tale. The women’s cabins were at some distance from the square, and nearer to the great house, and from the one to the other was passing a hurried line of women and children with the under overseer at their head.