speak to me. He was a lean, resolute man, very soberly clad for
that place, and already I had marked his face watching me in the
breakfasting hall, and afterwards as we went along the passage I
had avoided his eye. But now, as we sat in a little alcove,
smiling at the pleasure of all the people who went to and fro
across the shining floor, he came and touched me, and spoke to me
so that I was forced to listen. And he asked that he might speak
to me for a little time apart.

"'No,' I said. 'I have no secrets from this lady. What do
you want to tell me?'

"He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter,
for a lady to hear.

"'Perhaps for me to hear,' said I.

"He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her.
Then he asked me suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging
declaration that Evesham had made? Now, Evesham had always before
been the man next to myself in the leadership of that great party
in the north. He was a forcible, hard, and tactless man, and only
I had been able to control and soften him. It was on his account
even more than my own, I think, that the others had been so
dismayed at my retreat. So this question about what he had done
reawakened my old interest in the life I had put aside just for
a moment.

"'I have taken no heed of any news for many days,' I said.
'What has Evesham been saying?'