"You amaze me, Mr. Waverton."
"My lord, I can take you to the house."
"You are very obliging. Is he there now?"
"I believe not, my lord."
"And I believe not too. Mr. Waverton, the world is full of gentlemen who know where the Pretender was the other day. You are tedious. Where is he now?"
"My lord, I shall put in your power one who is in all his cunning secrets: one who is the treasonous mainspring of the plot."
Sunderland, who was something of a purist, made a grimace: "A treasonous mainspring! You may keep it, sir."
"You are pleased to be facetious, my lord. I warn you we have here no matter for levity. I shall deliver to your hands one who is deep in the most dangerous secrets of the Jacobites, art and part of the design which at this moment of peril and dismay brings the Pretender down upon our peace."
"Mr. Waverton, you are as dull as a play. Who is he, this bogey of yours?"
"He calls himself Boyce," said Mr. Waverton, with an intense sneer. "Harry Boyce, a shabby, scrubby trickster to the eye. You would take him for a starveling usher, a decayed footman. It's a lurker in holes and corners, indeed, a cringing, grovelling fellow. But with a heart full of treason and all the cunning of a base, low hypocrisy. Still a youth, but sodden in lying craft."