"I was making a home for thee, according to the commands of the Lord." "Not in the elm trees of a surety, Master Busy ?" "I was making a home for thee," he repeated without heeding her flippant observation, "by rendering myself illustrious.

I told thee, wench, did I not?
that something was happening within the precincts of Acol Court, and that it is my duty to lie in wait and to watch.

The heiress is about to be abducted, and it is my task to frustrate the evil designs of the mysterious criminal." She looked at him in speechless amazement.

He certainly looked strangely weird in the semi-darkness with his lanky hair plastered against his cheeks, his collar half torn from round his neck, the dripping, oily substance flowing in rivulets from his garments down upon the ground.
The girl had no longer any desire to laugh, and when Master Busy strode majestically across the rustic bridge, then over the garden paths to the kitchen quarter of the house, she followed him without a word, awed by his extraordinary utterances, vaguely feeling that in his dripping garments he somehow reminded her of Jonah and the whale..