"Ay, ay!" shouted Lee, starting to his feet, and waving the goblet high over his head. "Confusion to all crop-eared knaves. And now a toast. A toast!" "Silence! Oh, yes; oh, yes! Listen!" shrieked the noisy crew. "Fill high. His majesty the chairman proposes a toast." "The queen. God bless her!" cried Lee, putting the glass to his lips and draining it to the last drop. "Ho! ho! Ha! ha! Queen? Which queen?" cried the roysterers. "Which queen?--" "Queen Ruth, to be sure!" shouted one, hooking his arm into Lawrence's as Lee rose from the chair. "She of the Rye House, you blockheads. Queen Ruth!" [Sidenote: Lawrence escapes.] The sound of her name steadied Lee's senses like the working of a charm. He straightened himself to his full height, and striking out right and left, sent the troublesome fellows stumbling and tripping pell-mell among the chairs and tables. Then with a parting fling of his empty glass at the one who had dared to make a jest of the dear name, he rushed from the room--on, on--by the now entirely deserted ante-chambers, headlong down the grand staircase, through pitch dark interminable passages, until he found himself standing spent and breathless in the open air, the cloudless blue sky above him, and his feet ankle-deep in a miry lane. [Sidenote: The King's garden.] The place seemed to form a sort of thoroughfare to the back premises of the palace, whose walls skirted its length on one side, while the other was bounded by a tall privet-hedge. Between the ragged twigs he could discern the broad flat stretch of country beyond. On the left, some fifty yards off, stood the timbered plaster fronts of a row of street cottages, and a few paces to his right a high narrow iron gateway, flanked by a couple of moss-grown stone pillars surmounted respectively by the royal lion and unicorn. Through this gate's filigreed iron-work, at the end of a somewhat broad, gravel, yew-bordered path, Lee could see a podgy marble Cupid spouting water through a hunting-horn into a basin. Lured by the gentle plash of the water, he approached the gate and attempted to push it open. With a faint screech, as if of surprise at being disturbed, it yielded, and undeterred by its stone guardians, whose jaws seemed indeed to grin less in defiance of his intrusion, than in wonder and derision at his fancy for exploring the deserted place, Lee entered, and strolled towards the fountain. On its broad edge he seated himself, to the great confusion of the gold and silver fish moving about its weedy depths, and found that it formed the centre of a fair-sized garden, the path by which he had come being one of four, radiating off at equal distances between grass-plots, towards the lofty red brick boundary walls, gay now with the snowy blossom of espaliered fruit-trees.