Sir Mortimer passed his hand across brow and eyes as though to brush away thick cobwebs.  “Is it you, Giles Arden?” he asked.  “It was told me, or I dreamed it, that you were in Ireland.”

“I was, may God and St. George forgive me!” Arden answered, with determined lightness.  “Little to be got and hard in the getting!  Even the Muses were not bountiful, for my men and I wellnigh ate Edmund Spenser out of Kilcolman.  He sends you greeting, Mortimer; swears he is no jealous poet, and begs you to take up that old scheme which he forsook of King Arthur and his Knights—­”

“He is kind,” said Ferne, slowly.  “I am well fitted to write of old, heroic deeds.  Nor is there any doubt that the man-at-arms who hath lost his uses in the struggle of this world should take delight in quiet exile, sating his soul with the pomp of dead centuries.”

“Nor he nor I meant offence,” began Arden, hastily.

“I know you did not,” the other answered.  “I have grown churlish of late.  Robin! a stirrup-cup for Master Arden!”

A silence followed, then said Arden:  “And if I want it not, Mortimer?  And if, old memories stirring, I have ridden from London to Ferne House that I might see how thou wert faring?”

“Thou seest,” said Ferne.

“I see how bitterly thou art changed.”

“Ay, I am changed,” answered Sir Mortimer.  “Your thought was kindly, and I thank you for it.  Once these doors opened wide to all who knocked, but it is not so now.  Ride on to the town below the hill, and take your rest in the inn!  Your bedfellow may be Iscariot, but if you know him not, and as yet he knows himself but slenderly, you may sleep without dreaming.  Ride on!”

“The inn is full,” answered Arden, bluntly.  “This week the Queen rests in her progress with your neighbor, the Earl, and the town will be crowded with mummers and players, grooms, cutpurses, quacksalvers, and cockatrices, travellers and courtiers whom the north wind hath nipped!  ’Sblood, Mortimer, I had rather sleep in this grave old place!”

“With Judas who knows himself at last?” asked Ferne, coldly, without moving from his place.  The door opened, and old Humphrey, shuffling across the floor to the table, placed thereon a dish of cakes and a great tankard of sack, then as he turned away cast a backward glance upon his master’s face.  Arden noted the look, that there was in it fear, overmastering ancient kindness, and withal a curiosity as ignoble as it was keen.  Suddenly, as though the fire of that knowledge had leaped to his own heart from that of his host, he knew in every fibre how intolerable was the case of the master of the house, sitting alone in this gloomy chamber, served by this frightened boy, by that old man whose gaze was ever greedy for the quiver of an eyelid, the pressing together of white lips, whose coarse and prying hand ever strayed towards the unhealed sore.  He strode to the table and laid hands upon the tankard.  “The dust of the road is in my throat,” he explained, and drank deep of the wine, then put the tankard down and turned to the figure yet standing in the cold light as in an atmosphere all its own.