One lay on the floor with a coarse kerchief, such as grooms wear, knotted round his throat.

Over him bent a man in a long coat with a cape, a man in a dark peruke, whose face was clear in the lantern's light.

Lovel knew him for one Bedloe, a led-captain and cardsharper, whom he had himself employed on occasion.

The third man stood apart and appeared from his gesticulations to be speaking rapidly.
He wore his own sandy hair, and every line of his mean freckled face told of excitement and fear.

Him also Lovel recognised--Carstairs, a Scotch informer who had once made a handsome living through spying on conventicles, but had now fallen into poverty owing to conducting an affair of Buckingham's with a brutality which that fastidious nobleman had not bargained for....