"Perchance his warning was only to keep you from some rash flight. And, mayhap, now that his fears have passed away, he would receive you."
"I know not. If I might try!--hush, they are coming back!"
Ravenshaw could hear Sir Peregrine's cracked voice in the passage; but he ventured, quickly:
"I'd fain talk more of this--alone with you. When?"
"When you will," she replied, hurriedly. "I know not your plans."
"In your garden, then," he said at a hazard; "to-morrow at nightfall. Let the side gate be unlocked."
"Trust me; and meanwhile, if they turn sudden in the matter, and resolve to have the marriage forthwith, find shift to put it off, though you must e'en fall ill to hinder it."
"I'll vex myself into a fever, if need be!"
Ravenshaw was on his feet when the elder people came in; he advanced toward them as if he had waited impatiently that he might take his leave. As for Mistress Millicent, at sight of Sir Peregrine her face took on at once the petulant, rebellious look it had worn at his departure; no one would have supposed she had conversed during his absence.
When the captain had dismissed himself, he looked back for a moment from the threshold. The limping old coxcomb, more than ever self-satisfied after his supper, was bestowing a loverlike caress upon Mistress Millicent, who shrank from him as if she were a flower whose beauty might wither at his touch. With this vision before him, Ravenshaw was let out, by the side door, into Friday Street, and made his way eastward along Cheapside to meet the scholar by appointment among the evening idlers in the Pawn of the Exchange. He thought industriously, as he went.
"He keeps his promise best that breaks with hell."--_The Widow._
The Royal Exchange, or Gresham's Bourse, formed an open quadrangle, where the merchants congregated by day, which was surrounded by a colonnade; the roofed galleries over the colonnade made up the Pawn, where ladies and gentlemen walked and lounged in the evening, among bazaars and stalls. Naturally the uses of such a resort were not lost upon Captain Ravenshaw and Master Holyday, who had reasons for knowing all places where a houseless man might keep warm or dry in bad weather without cost. When Ravenshaw entered, on this particular May evening, he found the Pawn crowded, and lighted in a manner brilliant for those days. The scholar was leaning, pensive, against a post.