As the speaker ended, the dim light, just faintly glimmering at the entrance of the friendly shelter, was obscured by his shadow, and presently afterwards his companion, joining him, said,—
“Well, if it must be so; but how can you be fit to brave all the perils of our scheme, when you shrink, like a palsied crone, from the sprinkling of a few water-drops?”
“A few water-drops, my very good friend,” answered the other, “a few—what call you them, ay, water-falls rather; (ugh! ugh!) but let me tell you, my brother citizen, that a man may not like to get his skin wet with waters and would yet thrust his arm up to the very elbow in blood! (ugh! ugh!)”
“The devil!” mentally ejaculated Mr. Brown, who at the word “scheme” had advanced one step from his retreat, but who now at the last words of the intruder drew back as gently as a snail into his shell; and although his person was far too much enveloped in shade to run the least chance of detection, yet the honest broker began to feel a little tremor vibrate along the chords of his thrilling frame, and a new anathema against the fatal umbrella rise to his lips.
“Ah!” quoth the second, “I trust that it may be so; but, to return to our project, are you quite sure that these two identical ministers are in the regular habit of walking homeward from that Parliament which their despotism has so degraded?”
“Sure? ay, that I am; Davidson swears to it!”
“And you are also sure of their persons, so that, even in the dusk, you can recognize them? for you know I have never seen them.”
“Sure as fivepence!” returned the first speaker, to whose mind the lives of the persons referred to were of considerably less value than the sum elegantly specified in his metaphorical reply.
“Then,” said the other, with a deep, stern determination of tone, “then shall this hand, by which one of the proudest of our oppressors has already fallen, be made a still worthier instrument of the wrath of Heaven!”
“You are a d—d pretty shot, I believe,” quoth the first speaker, as indifferently as if he were praising the address of a Norfolk squire.