"Oh do not—do not speak of him," implored she, clasping her hands in agony. "My good, dear father, Lawrence. How can we save him?" she went on in calmer tones.
"Save your father?" said Lawrence, gazing in helpless dejection into the misery of her face.
"The king; the king; for to save him, is to save my father from—from—sure, Lawrence, he must be mad; he must be saved from himself. And I—you must do it. Do you hear? Do you understand?"
Understanding, Lawrence felt, might come in time. For the present, only his ears fully mastered what Ruth had said, and, helplessly shrugging his shoulders, he continued to stand gazing vacantly at the prostrate form of Rumsey's victim.
"Yes, yes," she said, her eyes following his, "you are quite right. He must not be found here."
The secret kept.
"But," began Lawrence, "how can we hide him?" and he glanced towards the door communicating with hers. She shook her head. "'Tis locked; my father has the key. He took it this morning. There is but one way;" and she pointed to the broken panel—"this."
Half an hour later, had any of the conspirators returned to the Warder's Room, they would have found no trace of what had occurred there since their departure.
First, as gently as he was able, Lawrence, with Ruth's assistance, carried the wounded man to the secret passage, and laid him on the bed which she hastily prepared for him from the pillows and coverings of her own bed. That done, he stepped back into the Warder's Room, and having, with the aid of the pitcher of water, succeeded in effacing the worst of the ugly tell-tale stain upon the floor, he set the chairs overturned in the fray upon their legs again, and then busied himself in collecting the scattered pieces and splinters of the broken panel. Finally, after no small labour, not lessened by having to reach across the space occupied by the body of the unconscious Goodenough, he pieced the panel together, so that it looked, as he said, keenly surveying it when he had done, "as if catapults could have made no impression on it."
"I doubt," said Ruth with a faint smile, "one must not, however, breathe on it too roughly lest it fall to pieces."