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"A song! a song!" exclaimed the highwaymen, clapping their hands and stamping their heels upon the floor. And then, amid the pause which followed, Sophie Tarne began a plaintive little ballad in a sweet, tremulous voice, which gathered strength as she proceeded.
Her father's name, she said, was Nichaud, and she had first met the prisoner twenty-three years ago in the village of Dalk, in the Department of the Tarne, where, in 1883, he had been convicted and sentenced for stealing bed linen from the Hôtel Kassam. She had remained faithful to him in spite of his disgrace, and had visited him daily in prison, bringing him milk and tobacco.
"Hold hard, Stango; there's a woman calling to us. Stop your row, will you?" A sudden cessation of the battering ensued, and some one was heard going rapidly backward over cobblestones amid the laughter of the rest, who had dismounted and were standing outside in the cold, with their hands upon their horses' bridles. "Who is there?" asked Sophie Tarne again.
Tarne, wholly forgetful of Reuben Pemberthy's safety after this suggestion. "Yes, it's as likely to be highwaymen as soldiers." It was more likely.
Tarne, accustomed, mayhap, to the roar and bustle of King's Norton, found the farm at Finchley a trifle dull and lonely, not that in a few days after a funeral she could expect any excessive display of life or frivolity, and, oppressed a bit that evening, was a trifle nervous as to the whereabouts of her future son-in-law, who had faithfully promised to be home a clear hour and a half before the present time, and whose word might be always taken to be as good as his bond.
Sophie Tarne singing her best to amuse this vile and disorderly crew, who sat or stood around the room half drunk, and with glasses in their hands, pipes in their mouths, and the formidable, old-fashioned horse-pistols in their pockets!
And, sure enough, while Sophie Tarne had been talking to the captain, some one had severed the keys from her girdle and made off with them, and there was only a clean-cut black ribbon dangling at her waist instead. "That villain Stango," exclaimed the captain "I saw him pass a minute ago. He leaned over and whispered to you, Kits. You remember?"
He had got rid of all his relatives save two six days after his father's funeral; and those two were stopping by general consent, because it was signed, sealed, and delivered by those whom it most concerned, that the younger woman, his cousin, pretty Sophie Tarne, was to be married before the year was out to the present Reuben Pemberthy, who had wooed her and won her consent when he went down to her mother's house at King's Norton for a few days' trip last summer.
"I will see to them," said Sophie, who had become in her young, brave strength quite the mistress of the ceremonies. "Leave the rest to me." "And if you can persuade them to go away " began Mrs. Tarne; but her daughter had already disappeared, and was parleying through the keyhole with the strangers without.
"And the rest of the men would kill us, the brutes," said Mrs. Pemberthy. "Yes, they'd better come in." "Lord have mercy upon us," said Mrs. Tarne. "There's no help for it," said Mrs. Pemberthy. "Even Reuben would not have dared to keep them out. I mind now their coming like this twenty years agone. It was "
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