“You knew full well what you were promising, John Ireton!” he said.  “She is not here.”

XLIX

IN WHICH A LAWYER HATH HIS FEE

What Richard’s most natural resentment would have led to, in what new tangle of the net of bitterness we might have been enmeshed, we were spared the knowing.  For when he said, “She is not here,” two happenings intervened to give us both other things to think of.

The first was the advent, at the far end of the oak-lined avenue, of a troop of British light-horse, trotting leisurely; the second was the swinging inward of the door of unwelcome, with old Anthony grinning and bowing behind it.

Now when you have fairly surprised a fox in the open, he asks nothing more than a hole to hide him in.  There were the hunters coming up the avenue; and here was our dodge-hole gaping before us.  So, as hunted things will, we took earth quickly; though, truly, ’twas an ostrich-trick rather than a fox’s, since we left the horses standing without to advertise our presence to all and sundry.

It was Richard who first found the wit to realize the ostrich-play.

“The horses!—­we may as well have left the town crier outside to ring his bell and tell the redcoats we are here,” he would say; and before I knew what he would be at he had snatched the door open and was whistling softly to the big gray.

Hearing his master’s call, the gray pricked his ears and came obediently, with the sorrel tagging at his heels.  A moment later, when the up-coming troop was hidden by a turn in the avenue, we had the pair of them in the hall with the door shut and barred behind them.

“So far, so good,” quoth Dick.  Then to the old black, who had stood by, saucer-eyed and speechless, the while:  “Anthony, do you be as big a numbskull as you were born to be, and hold these redcoat gentlemen in palaver till we can win out at the back.”

The old majordomo nodded his good-will, but now my slow wit came in play.  “We’ve done it now,” said I.  “The horses will go out as they came in, or not at all.  Had you forgotten the stair at the back?”

Judge for yourselves, my dears, if this were the time, place or crisis for a man to fling himself upon the hall settle, grip his ribs and laugh like any lack-wit.  Yet this is what Richard Jennifer did.

It was in the very midst of his gust of ill-timed merriment, while the horses were nosing niftily at their strange surroundings, and the hoof-strokes of the redcoat troop could be plainly heard on the gravel of the avenue, that I chanced to lift my eyes to the stair.  There, looking down upon us with speechless astoundment in the blue-gray eyes, stood our dear lady.

Another instant and she was with us, stamping her foot and crying:  “Mon Dieu! what is this?  Are you gone mad, both of you?”

Dick’s answer was another burst of laughter, loud enough, you would think, to be heard by those beyond the door.