"Why? Fie, now, fie!" laughed Lawrence, fixing his eyes with something of uneasy curiosity in their clear, dark depths, on Rumbold's face. "That, they say, is the Jesuits' watchword. Who would have thought to hear it from the lips of godly Master Rumbold?"
"You mock me," returned Rumbold; "I am the worst of sinners."
"Nay, nay, but I trust not," said Lee, getting really uncomfortable.
"You mock me, I say," reiterated Rumbold.
"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Lee. "It is rather that you mock me; for by my faith I do not understand you to-night, Master Rumbold."
The whisper of a conspirator.
"Listen," hoarsely said Rumbold, turning suddenly on Lee, and gripping him by the elbow; "you shall understand. I will explain, but not here," he went on, dropping his voice to a whisper, and casting a far-seeing, cautious glance round. "Not here: there may be eavesdroppers. Hark! what's that?"
"Only the beasts munching their supper in the stables," said Lee. "They will tell no tales."
"The very air must not hear," said Rumbold.
"Why, if it is so particular as all that, then," rejoined Lawrence, still half jestingly, but growing less and less light about his heart, "come this way." And pushing open a wicket, he conducted his companion along a rather miry slip of by-road towards the apple orchard, which stretched behind and around the ruined gatehouse, whose jagged outlines were beginning to stand out grim and gaunt in the sickly rays of the moon. Wading through the long grass so thickly carpeting the ground up to the tower, that its base was completely hidden, Lee conducted Rumbold to the top of a small flight of broken stone steps, so lost in an overgrowth of ivy trails and brambles as to be invisible to stranger eyes; but Lee, with a thrust of his hand, parted the leafy screen, and signed to Rumbold to follow him down the steps, which led to a low, iron-clamped and heavily padlocked door deeply sunken in the wall of the tower's foundations.