“I will tell him,” I quietly said, rising and starting away; but he halted me.
“Why do you ask those questions?” he said more composedly.
“The king told me to. He wants to know if he can trust you. If you want these people sent away,——”
“I don’t! That would ruin everything. They’d send armies and war-ships, and——”
“Then, kept here—alive?”
“Certainly not! They’d kill me.”
I had known this to be the answer that I would wring from him; still the renewed impulse to strangle him was almost overpowering.
“I will tell the king,” I duly said, and was turning away, when another idea came. “Maybe he will first send for a man from your people. Which one do you want to go before the young men?”
“Tudor, Captain Mason’s assistant,” he answered with a vicious promptness. “Then, as soon as the young men are gone, I and my daughter and Rawley will go, and I will talk and plan with the king while the soldiers do their work here.”
The humor that I found in the turn, personal to me, which the situation had taken, lightened my spirit, and I thought of something else.