“I am very weary,” said the woman. “Can we not choose a better season to discuss this matter?”
“Madam,” said the landlord harshly, “I choose to discuss it now. But first, before I do so, I must have your name. Your companion and yourself have been two days immured in my best taffety chamber fronting the sea, yet up to this very hour have I been denied what is the first essential to us innkeepers. But, madam, I must have it now.”
The woman looked at his cold face falteringly. Then she withdrew her eyes and took a further refuge in her silence.
“Madam, I demand it,” said Gamaliel, sternly. “The times are greatly perilous, and what assurances have I that you are not a pair of malignants, a pair of proscribed Royalists, a pair of Charles Stuart’s friends and my Lord Cromwell’s enemies?”
The woman trembled. When the hunted doe takes to the water, it has the look and manner that the pale woman had then. The landlord wrote every inflection of her demeanour down in his heart. His two little eyes, now contracted with their cunning so that they looked like two glass beads in his head, pierced her like steel. In spite of herself she shuddered. She closed her own eyes that she might not see them.
“Madam, I swear I will not be put off,” said the landlord. “I demand your name and the name of your companion.”
The woman’s lips were frozen. Twice she struggled to speak, and twice no words issued from them. The landlord had chosen his moment craftily. The unexpectedness of his appearance at that hour, and the shaken state she was in already, thanks to her adventures in the night, left her at a hopeless disadvantage. She might have the desire to dissemble, but she certainly had not the power. She was bound hand and foot at his mercy.
“I would prefer to withhold our names for the present,” she said at last, in a hoarse whisper.
“That you shall not do, madam,” said the landlord. “I must have your names here, now, this instant.”
“I cannot give them,” said the woman, simply.