"Indeed? Know you who the lady is?"
"No! nor can I even guess. All the maids-of-honour are young and full of fun, and no doubt the girlish pranks were harmless enough, but Her Majesty is very austere and rigidly stern where questions of decorum are concerned."
"So the Duchess of Lincoln, like a watchful dragon, would catch the fair miscreant in flagrante delicto, eh?" continued His Eminence.
Mechanically he turned to walk along the path recently followed by the night watchman. His Eminence would have scorned the idea of any superstition influencing his precise, calculating mind, but, nevertheless, he had a strange belief in the guiding hand of Chance, and somehow at the present moment he had an unaccountable presentiment, that this gossip anent some young girl's frolic would in some way exercise an influence on his present schemes.
As if in immediate answer to these very thoughts a woman's frightened scream was suddenly heard close by, followed by muttered curses in the watchman's gruff voice.
"What was that?" exclaimed Everingham involuntarily.
"The lady in flagrante delicto, meseems," rejoined the Cardinal quietly.
And both men began to walk more rapidly in the direction whence had come the woman's scream. The next few moments brought them upon the scene, and soon in the gloom they distinguished the figure of the old watchman apparently struggling with a woman, whose head and shoulders were enveloped in some sort of veil or hood. The lanthorn, evidently violently thrown on the ground, had rolled down the path some little distance from this group.
The woman was making obvious and frantic efforts to get away, whilst the old watchman exerted all his strength to keep tight hold of her wrists.
"What is it to thee, man, what I am doing here?" the woman gasped in the midst of her struggles. "Let me go, I say!"