It was not a question which Sir Charles could discuss. He said
nothing, and was again left alone in the darkness, listening to the
shuffling footsteps of Mr. Mardale as, for the last time, he mounted
the stairs.




MR. MITCHELBOURNE'S LAST ESCAPADE.


It was in the kitchen of the inn at Framlingham that Mr. Mitchelbourne
came across the man who was afraid, and during the Christmas week
of the year 1681. Lewis Mitchelbourne was young in those days, and
esteemed as a gentleman of refinement and sensibility, with a queer
taste for escapades, pardonable by reason of his youth. It was his
pride to bear his part in the graceful tactics of a minuet, while a
saddled horse waited for him at the door. He delighted to vanish of a
sudden from the lighted circle of his friends into the byways where
none knew him, or held him of account, not that it was all vanity with
Mitchelbourne though no doubt the knowledge that his associates
in London Town were speculating upon his whereabouts tickled him
pleasurably through many a solitary day. But he was possessed both of
courage and resource, qualities for which he found too infrequent an
exercise in his ordinary life; and so he felt it good to be free for
awhile, not from the restraints but from the safeguards, with
which his social circumstances surrounded him. He had his spice of
philosophy too, and discovered that these sharp contrasts,--luxury and
hardship, treading hard upon each other and the new strange people
with whom he fell in, kept fresh his zest of life.