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168 to-night. It was the Fifth of November. He had had to write the date two hundred times so he was fairly certain of it. He was afraid of saying too much or too little. And for the life of him he could not remember the date of the Gunpowder Plot. Still he must say something, so he said— "Are there more verses?"

"No," said Elfrida.

"I wonder," he said, trying to feel his way, "what treason the ballad deals with?"

He felt it had been the wrong thing to say, when Elfrida answered in surprised tones— "Don't you know? I know. And I know some of the names of the conspirators and who they wanted to kill and everything."

"Tell me" seemed the wisest thing to say, and he said it as carelessly as he could.

"The King hadn't been fair to the Catholics, you know," said Elfrida, who evidently knew all about the matter, "so a lot of them decided to kill him and the Houses of Parliament. They made a plot—there were a whole lot of them in it."

The clock-stopping feeling came on again. Elfrida was different somehow. The Elfrida who had gone on the barge to Gravesend and played with him at the Deptford house had never used such expressions as "a whole lot of them in it." He looked at her and she went on—

"They said Lord Arden was in it, but he wasn't, and some of them were to pretend to be hunting and to seize the Princess Elizabeth