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persuasive arms about her husband’s shoulders. When she smiled like that it was easy to see from whom Frances inherited her coaxing ways, and difficult to deny her. But Edward Trattle was a long-thinking man, not readily moved from his convictions by the emotions of the moment. Gently he detached Agnes’s clinging hands. “’Twas prettily done and I was as proud as you, wife,” he admitted. “But maybe ’twas unwise.”
    His wife stared at him in amazement. “Edward Trattle, you’d never be chicken-hearted enough to fawn to the opinions of these ranting Puritans?” she gasped.
    “Or be thinking of your own skin?” joined in Burley indignantly.
    “’Tis Charles Stuart’s skin I am thinking of,” answered the innkeeper, thoughtfully twirling the contents of his half-empty glass. “Many’s the time I’ve seen it happen in a brawl that you can help a man better if you are not suspected of being his friend.” He looked up to make sure the door was shut and the servants gone before attempting to explain a half-formulated idea. “Men come and go in my house. Men of all kinds and parties. Their tongues are loosened with my good liquor, so that whether I will or not I hear a mort of things. The ‘Bull’ has a definitely Cromwellian trade. Jackson of the ‘George’ hears many a royalist toast raised over his tankards. A time may come when it will be wiser for the ‘Rose and Crown’ to cater for no particular party.”
    “Meaning that you want the trade of both?” accused Burley, because his blood was overheated by excitement and a good deal more of his host’s good Burgundy than his doctor would have allowed.
    Mercifully Trattle, who knew all the old man’s weaknesses, was both morally and financially above any need to defend himself. “I mean because no one is sure which side the Governor himself is really on,” he said quietly. “On Saturday before he left for the Main he told some of us councillors that he had insisted upon going with those two gentlemen to escort the King across so as to ensure his Majesty’s safety. Yet as you saw just now he did not have that mud-slinging crop-head clapped into the stocks. So who knows but what—should the King stay here long—it may not prove useful for his friends to be able to come into my house without being labelled royalists?”
    The serious moment passed, and was soon relieved by Mary’s anxious insistence that she must get back to the castle. Attention focused upon her now because she would presently be in the place where all their thoughts were. “You will see the King every day!” they said.
    “And I suppose she may even help make his Majesty’s bed!” pouted Frances enviously.
    “And perhaps be allowed to launder that priceless lace collar he was wearing!” sighed Agnes Trattle, wishing that she had brought up her own daughter to be less decorative and more domesticated.
    But Mary only laughed as she kissed her friend’s flushed cheek. “Even if I do is it likely that his Majesty would ever be aware of my existence? Much less speak to me as he did to you,” she said comfortingly. “And truly, Frances, I should feel like sinking through the floor if he did!”
    Edward Trattle rode part way home with her lest there should be any roughness among the crowd, and once back in the castle, her estimate of her own unimportance seemed to be only too correct. She had missed the garrison’s diligently drilled reception, which she would have been so proud to watch, and was scolded for loitering because the imposing Trattle salt cellar was only just in time for the King’s table. And far from gazing at their important guests, she spent the rest of the day obeying her aunt’s instructions and running up and down the backstairs trying to help the flustered servants. From time to time, as the dishes were being carried in, she caught the sound of men’s animated voices. And once when she paused to rearrange a dish of fruit which one of the men