“Plain Edward Talbot, Baronet, at your ladyship’s service,” he said, with another of his fine bows.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, “do tell me all about it from the beginning.” So he told her, and the other gentlemen stood by, laughing.
“The other night I was dining with Mr. Fitzgerald here, and the talk turned on highway robbery, and on Arden Castle here, with other matters. And these gentlemen, with others of the party, laid me a wager—five hundred guineas it was—that I would not rob a coach. I took the wager. And I wagered beside that I would rob a coach of the Arden jewels, and that I would lie a night at Arden beside, and no one should know my name there. And I have done all three and won my wager. I am but newly come home from foreign parts, so your cousin could not know my face. But zounds, child! had it not been for thee I had lost my wager. I counted on Miss Arden’s help—and a pale-faced, fainting, useless fine lady I should have found her. But thou—thou’rt a girl in a thousand. And I’ll buy thee the finest fairing I can find next time I go to London. We are all friends. Tell pretty miss to hold that tongue of hers, and none shall hear the tale from us.”
“But all these gentlemen coming last night. All the servants know.”
“The gentlemen came, no doubt, to protect Miss Arden, in case the villainous highwayman should have hidden behind the window curtain. Oh, but the wise child it is—has a care for every weak point in our armour!”
Then he told his friends the whole of the adventure, and they laughed very merrily, for all they had lost their wager, and went home to breakfast across the dewy fields.
“It’s nice of him to think me brave and all that,” Elfrida told herself, “but I do wish he’d really been the King.”
When she had told Betty what had happened everything seemed suddenly to be not worth while; she did not feel as though she cared to stay any longer in that part of the past—so she ran upstairs, through the attic and the pigeon noises, back into her own times, and went down and found Edred sitting on the second hand of the daisy-clock; and he did not believe that she had been away at all. For all the time she had been away seemed no time to him, because he had been sitting on that second hand.
So when the Mouldiwarp told them to go along in, they went; and the way they went was not in, but out, and round under the castle wall to the corner from which you could see the sea. And there they lay on the warm grass, and Elfrida told Edred the whole story, and at first he did not believe a word of it.
“But it’s true, I tell you,” said she. “You don’t suppose I should make up a whole tale like that, do you?”