“Your ambition hath a goose-flight. What would you give for the treat?”
“Anything but my good name.”
“I stand corrected, sweetling. Here, take your golden egg, and never part with your goose.”
He took her chin in his hand.
“Bite,” he said, and clipped a guinea between her white teeth.
“That shall go to my credit,” he said to himself as he walked off; and made his way slowly to his rooms in Whitehall.
Therein he did not remain long, but came out very shortly, a pocket of his riding-coat bulged in a sinister manner.
He went down the Strand and Fleet Street, at a faster pace now, passed Temple Bar, with its three gaunt spikes yet shooting from the topmost arch, like dry stalks from which the ugly blossom had long withered and fallen, and turning into the cloisteral recesses of the Temple, fell loitering again, moved by the silence and antiquity of the place.
It was a fresh-blown morning, sweet with virginal sunshine, and the old haunted walls and windows of the courts seemed elbowing one another in eagerness to obtain largesse of light.
Glancing upward, he read on a dial set in the stained red brick wall of a house in the Inner Temple—“Begone about your business.”