smoothed down her scarf, threw a soft expression into her features, and
led the way into the next room, whither she was followed by her daughter
and Thames Darrell.




CHAPTER III.

The Jacobite.


Mr. William Kneebone was a woollen-draper of "credit and renown," whose
place of business was held at the sign of the Angel (for, in those
days, every shop had its sign), opposite Saint Clement's church in the
Strand. A native of Manchester, he was the son of Kenelm Kneebone, a
staunch Catholic, and a sergeant of dragoons, who lost his legs and his
life while fighting for James the Second at the battle of the Boyne, and
who had little to bequeath his son except his laurels and his loyalty to
the house of Stuart.

The gallant woollen-draper was now in his thirty-sixth year. He had a
handsome, jolly-looking face; stood six feet two in his stockings; and
measured more than a cloth-yard shaft across the shoulders--athletic
proportions derived from his father the dragoon. And, if it had not been
for a taste for plotting, which was continually getting him into
scrapes, he might have been accounted a respectable member of society.

Of late, however, his plotting had assumed a more dark and dangerous
complexion. The times were such that, with the opinions he entertained,