It was only by something like a miracle, however, that Lee was still able to breathe. "Speak!" shouted the king, and his imperious tones echoed again and again through the vaulted place, till for the moment he might well have fancied that a host of conspirators were hidden away behind the pillared arches; but not a creature came to the rescue, and Charles's grip relaxed. "I cry your pardon," he said then, a little shamefacedly, and retaining his hold about Lee's shoulder more in kindness now than in anger. "Such doubts are unworthy. A miserable requital indeed for this good service you have shown me. Your face should be no traitor's. Nay, never blush. I thought this morning that 'twas as honest a one as I had seen for many a day, and should tell its own story." [Sidenote: A desperate plan.] "Yet even though my tongue helped it, your Majesty would not listen. Yet here as we stand," went on Lee, as Charles replied only by a shrug of his shoulders, "man to man, liege-man to his lord," and Lawrence fell on his knees at the king's feet, "I swear I spoke the truth. But it was to worse than deaf ears. All in vain--and so--and so--" his voice faltered. "And so--Ods-fish, man!" cried Charles in bewildered astonishment at the agitation of Lee's face. "Don't be afraid. Speak out. And so?" "I fired the palace." "You!" cried the king, recoiling in horror. "What else was to be done?" asked Lee, regaining his composure, and shrugging his shoulders in his turn! "We smoke out the fox's hole when we can't unearth him." "To kill him after all, poor fellow," said the king, with a half smile, and a faint glimmer of the old suspicion in his dark eyes fixed on Lawrence, as though he was striving to penetrate to his inmost heart. "Nay," bluntly answered the young man, "I have no wit for carrying on conceits of that kind, nor time for it neither. If I burnt out the fox, 'twas to save him from himself, and get him to make off out of harm's way." "And what of the queen, and all my poor people?" cried the king, looking with troubled eyes along the way they had come. "A heavy ransom they are paying for my rescue. Let us get out of this place, and help, before every one of them is burned in bed." [Sidenote: Out of danger.] "'Tis but little enough harm they'll come to, I'll warrant," said Lee, in cool tones, and detaining the king with a firm hand. "The fire had a mighty pretty effect," he continued, with pride, "a mighty pretty effect; and so do a man's frills and furbelows, though he hasn't a thread of shirt underneath to bless himself with; and 'twas just that and no more--a flash in the pan, a snap-dragon, that has but just burned up all your Majesty's little favourite odds and ends, and rattle-traps, but I doubt it had not done a groat's worth of harm." "That's reassuring," said the king dismally.