place, if the country was bent upon these civil broils, clearly his intended character of pipe-smoking, ale-drinking citizen was wholly unsuited to the coming play. Wherefore, in a jiff he had abandoned it, and now stood, mentally, as naked as a plucked fowl while he considered what costume he should wear and what [Pg 18]character he should choose to interpret. His sense of humor tempted him to the sanctimonious suit of your out-and-out Parliament man; his love for finery and the high horse lured him to lovelocks and feathers. The old piratical instinct which he thought he had put to bed forever was awake in him, too, and asking which side could be made to pay the best for his services. If he must take sides, which side would fill his pockets the fuller? It was in the thick of these thoughts that he found himself within a few feet of the walls of the park of Harby.

[Pg 18]

The great gates were closed that his boyhood found always open. He smiled a little, and his smile increased as a figure stepped from behind the nearest tree within the walls, a sturdy, fresh-looking serving-fellow armed with a musketoon.

“Hail, friend,” sang out Halfman, and “Stand, stranger,” answered the man with the musketoon. Halfman eyed him good-humoredly.

“You do not carry your weapon well,” he commented. “Were I hostile and armed you would be a dead jack before you could bring butt to shoulder. Yet you are a soldierly fellow and wear a fighting face.”

The man with the musketoon met the censure [Pg 19]and the commendation with the same frown as he surlily demanded the stranger’s business at the gates of Harby.

[Pg 19]

“My business,” answered Halfman, blithely, “is with the Lady of Harby,” and before the other could shape the refusal of his eyes into an articulate grumble he went on, briskly, “Tell the Lady Brilliana Harby that an old soldier who is a Harby man born has some words to say to her which she may be willing to hear.”

“Are you a King’s man,” the other questioned, still holding his weapon in awkward watchfulness of the stranger. Halfman laughed pleasantly.

“Who but a King’s man could hope to have civil speech with the Lady Brilliana Harby?”

He plucked off his hat as he spoke and waved it in the air with a flourish. “God save the King!” he shouted, loyally, and for the moment his heart was as loyal as his voice, untroubled by any thought 

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