thought he; "I may save you yet!"

"Have you been long plagued with the fellows?" he asked, after a pause,
as he was paying his bill.

"Why, my lord, we have and we have not. I fancy as how they have a sort
of a haunt near Reading, for sometimes they are intolerable just about
there, and sometimes they are quiet for months together! For instance,
my lord, we thought them all gone some time ago; but lately they have
regularly stopped every one, though I hear as how they have cleared no
great booty as yet."

Here the waiter announced the horses, and Mauleverer slowly re-entered
his carriage, among the bows and smiles of the charmed spirits of the
hostelry.

During the daylight Mauleverer, who was naturally of a gallant and
fearless temper, thought no more of the highwaymen,--a species of danger
so common at that time that men almost considered it disgraceful to
suffer the dread of it to be a cause of delay on the road. Travellers
seldom deemed it best to lose time in order to save money; and they
carried with them a stout heart and a brace of pistols, instead of
sleeping all night on the road. Mauleverer, rather a _preux chevalier_,
was precisely of this order of wayfarers; and a night at an inn, when it
was possible to avoid it, was to him, as to most rich Englishmen, a
tedious torture zealously to be shunned. It never, therefore, entered
into the head of our excellent nobleman, despite his experience, that his
diamonds and his purse might be saved from all danger if he would consent
to deposit them, with his own person, at some place of hospitable
reception; nor, indeed, was it till he was within a stage of Reading, and