'Go! Go whither?'

'Hush, lad, and listen! Let not your mother know too much, for the
hearts of women are soft. When Abraham offered up his eldest born, I
trow that he said little to Sarah on the matter. Here is the letter.
Know you who this Dicky Rumbold is?'

'Surely I have heard you speak of him as an old companion of yours.'

'The same--a staunch man and true. So faithful was he--faithful even to
slaying--that when the army of the righteous dispersed, he did not lay
aside his zeal with his buff-coat. He took to business as a maltster at
Hoddesdon, and in his house was planned the famous Rye House Plot, in
which so many good men were involved.'

'Was it not a foul assassination plot?' I asked.

'Nay, nay, be not led away by terms! It is a vile invention of the
malignants that these men planned assassination. What they would do
they purposed doing in broad daylight, thirty of them against fifty of
the Royal Guard, when Charles and James passed on their way to
Newmarket. If the royal brothers got pistol-bullet or sword-stab, it
would be in open fight, and at the risk of their attackers. It was give
and take, and no murder.'

He paused and looked inquiringly at me; but I could not truthfully say
that I was satisfied, for an attack upon the lives of unarmed and
unsuspecting men, even though surrounded by a bodyguard, could not, to
my mind, be justified.