"I haven't the ghost of a notion, I tell you," said Lawrence, watching the exhibition with absent impatient eyes, into which, however, a gleam of hopeful intelligence began to dawn; "but think I know what you are. One of the king's lackey fellows." [Sidenote: The lackey.] "Sirrah!" "For sure!" and Lawrence slapped his knee, and his face grew full of animation. "How came I not to recognize the cut of you sooner, when I've seen any number of you hanging as thick as thieves scores of times--about the King's Arms, swilling down its cider--" "To which King's Arms do you refer, my good fellow?" lisped the lackey. "There's hundreds of 'em scattered over the country." "Opposite Master Rumbold's." "Never heard of the fellow," said the lackey, airily stroking his little chin. "Hang me now if I have. Shouldn't be able to tell him from Adam, renounce me now if I should. Rumbold? Rumbold?" "Of the Rye House." "Never so much as heard of the place," said the lackey, and slowly shaking his head with the action and beatifically vacuous smile of a Chinese image. "That shows how little you know the king, then, for he knows it well enough," contemptuously returned Lawrence, "as well as he does one of his palaces. 'Twas a palace too itself, once upon a time; and 'tis big enough for the squinniest eyes to see." [Illustration: LAWRENCE ENCOUNTERS MR. FLIPPET] "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" screeched the other. "Hear the clodhopper--all his geese are swans. I apprehend you'll be for telling me next that your Rye House is as fine an edifice as this;" and he languidly extended his hand in the direction of the house beneath whose walls they stood. "This!" echoed Lawrence, laughing merrily. "This dog-hole of a place hold a candle to our old Rye House! Come," and briskly twitching Stars and Garters by the rein, he was about to push on, "how much farther to the king's palace?" [Sidenote: Mr. Alworth.] "Under this archway and across the yard," said a voice immediately behind him. Lawrence's face fell blankly. If he had not quite anticipated walls of gold and columns of ivory, he had conceived of something statelier than this mean, patched-up-looking house. "I thank you, sir," he contrived, however, to say at last, turning to the speaker and lifting his cap deferentially, as he perceived him to be an elderly man, somewhat tall and still fairly robust, in an iron-gray periwig, and with a genial glance in his keen gray eyes, overshadowed by brows still thick and dark. The Mr. Alworth, in fact, whose acquaintance we have already made upon the heath. "And if," continued Lawrence, "you will add to your obligation by telling me how I may come to speak with the king--" "Ho!" chuckled the lackey; "renounce me if ever I heard the like of that!"