Crispin came close up to him, and placed a hand upon his shoulder.

The boy shrank visibly beneath the touch, and again an expression of pain crossed the poor ruffler's face.
"Do you recall, Kenneth," he said slowly, almost sorrowfully, "the story that I told you that night in Worcester, when we sat waiting for dawn and the hangman ?" The lad nodded vacantly.
"Do you remember the details?
Do you remember I told you how, when I swooned beneath the stroke of Joseph Ashburn's sword, the last words I heard were those in which he bade his brother slit the throat of the babe in the cradle?
You were, yourself, present yesternight at Castle Marleigh when Joseph Ashburn told me Gregory had been mercifully inclined; that my child had not died; that if I gave him his life he would restore him to me.

You remember ?" Again Kenneth nodded.

A vague, numbing fear was creeping round his heart, and his blood seemed chilled by it and stagnant.

With fascinated eyes he watched the knight's face--drawn and haggard.
"It was a trap that Joseph Ashburn set for me.