They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of Falmouth’s advance had driven the villagers hillward.  There was in this place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep, overlooked in his elders’ gross terror.  As the Queen with a sob lifted this boy the child died.

“Starved!” said Osmund Heleigh; “and within a stone’s throw of my snug home!”

The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed its sparse flaxen hair.  She answered nothing, though her lips moved.

Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters, they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to afford his troop passage.  The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a coin, with a jest sufficiently high flavored.  She knew the man her inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed her as he would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.

“This is remarkable,” Messire Heleigh observed.  “I was hideously afraid, and am yet shaking.  But you, madame, laughed.”

The Queen replied:  “I laughed because I know that some day I shall have Lord Falmouth’s head.  It will be very sweet to see it roll in the dust, my Osmund.”

Messire Heleigh somewhat dryly observed that tastes differed.

At Jessop Minor befell a more threatening adventure.  Seeking food at the Cat and Hautbois in that village, they blundered upon the same troop at dinner in the square about the inn.  Falmouth and his lieutenants were somewhere inside the house.  The men greeted the supposed purveyors of amusement with a shout; and one of these soldiers—­a swarthy rascal with his head tied in a napkin—­demanded that the jongleurs grace their meal with a song.

Osmund tried to put him off with a tale of a broken viol.

But, “Haro!” the fellow blustered; “by blood and by nails! you will sing more sweetly with a broken viol than with a broken head.  I would have you understand, you hedge thief, that we gentlemen of the sword are not partial to wordy argument.”  Messire Heleigh fluttered inefficient hands as the men-at-arms gathered about them, scenting some genial piece of cruelty.  “Oh, you rabbit!” the trooper jeered, and caught at Osmund’s throat, shaking him.  In the act this rascal tore open Messire Heleigh’s tunic, disclosing a thin chain about his neck and a handsome locket, which the fellow wrested from its fastening.  “Ahoi!” he continued.  “Ahoi, my comrades, what sort of minstrel is this, who goes about England all hung with gold like a Cathedral Virgin!  He and his sweetheart”—­the actual word was grosser—­“will be none the worse for an interview with the Marquess.”

The situation smacked of awkwardness, because Lord Falmouth was familiar with the Queen, and to be brought specifically to his attention meant death for two detected masqueraders.  Hastily Osmund Heleigh said: