"Are you in truth a rebel!" she demanded without giving me time to catch my breath.
"Faith, I was one."
"But are you one now!"
"Not in my own heart; but the Bow Street runners think otherwise."
"A fig for them!" she cried. "Men have little enough sense, and when you place 'em in authority they grow imbecile. Sit yourself down again, Master Ormerod, the while I set a bandage about this arm of Robert's, and then you shall have a draft of mulled ale and a dish of deviled bones and thereafterward a bed with sheets that have lain in Dorset lavender. Hath it a welcome sound to you!"
The tears came into my eyes.
"I am happier this night than I have been any time since Charles and I left Foxcroft," I said. "But pray tell me why you two, who are strangers to me, should be so interested in an outcast?"
"He does not know?" exclaimed the little old lady.
"I have told him nothing," said Juggins, smiling.
"Tut, tut," she rebuked him. "Was it well to be tight-mouthed with an Ormerod?"