"I haven't the ghost of a notion, I tell you," said Lawrence, watching the exhibition with absent impatient eyes, into which, however, a gleam of hopeful intelligence began to dawn; "but think I know what you are. One of the king's lackey fellows."
The lackey.
"Sirrah!"
"For sure!" and Lawrence slapped his knee, and his face grew full of animation. "How came I not to recognize the cut of you sooner, when I've seen any number of you hanging as thick as thieves scores of times—about the King's Arms, swilling down its cider—"
"To which King's Arms do you refer, my good fellow?" lisped the lackey. "There's hundreds of 'em scattered over the country."
"Opposite Master Rumbold's."
"Never heard of the fellow," said the lackey, airily stroking his little chin. "Hang me now if I have. Shouldn't be able to tell him from Adam, renounce me now if I should. Rumbold? Rumbold?"
"Of the Rye House."
"Never so much as heard of the place," said the lackey, and slowly shaking his head with the action and beatifically vacuous smile of a Chinese image.
"That shows how little you know the king, then, for he knows it well enough," contemptuously returned Lawrence, "as well as he does one of his palaces. 'Twas a palace too itself, once upon a time; and 'tis big enough for the squinniest eyes to see."