D'ye take me ?" Bedloe declared with oaths his admiration of the Doctor's wit, and good humour filled the hovel; All but Lovel, who once again was wrestling with something elemental in him that threatened to ruin every thing.

He remembered the bowed stumbling figure that had gone before him in the Marylebone meadows.

Then he had been its enemy; now by a queer contortion of the mind he thought of himself as the only protector of that cold clay under the bed--honoured in life, but in death a poor pawn in a rogue's cause.

He stood a little apart from the others near the door, and his eyes sought it furtively.

He was not in the plot, and yet the plotters did not trouble about him.