Seeing now plainly that I was in the hands of one of Lord Westport's gardeners, who had mistaken me for some garden-thief for whom he had been on the lookout, I began to expostulate very pointedly. But always this man stolidly faced me with the yawning mouth of the blunderbuss.
"And now ye 'll march," said he, and despite everything I marched. I marched myself through the little door in the wall, and into the gardens of the Earl of Westport. And the infernal weapon was clamped against the small of my back.
But still my luck came to me even then, like basket falling out of a blue sky. As, in obedience to my captor's orders, I rounded a bit of shrubbery, I came face to face with Lady Mary. I stopped so abruptly that the rim of the on-coming blunderbuss must have printed a fine pink ring on my back. I lost all intelligence. I could not speak. I only knew that I stood before the woman I loved, while a man firmly pressed the muzzle of a deadly firearm between my shoulder-blades. I flushed with shame, as if I really had been guilty of stealing the French pears.
Lady Mary's first look upon me was one of pure astonishment. Then she quickly recognized the quaint threat expressed in the attitude of the blunderbuss.
"Strammers," she cried, rushing forward, "what would you be doing to the gentleman?"
"'T is no gentleman, your la'ship," answered the man confidently. "He be a low-born thief o' pears, he be."
"Strammers!" she cried again, and wrested the blunderbuss from his hands. I will confess that my back immediately felt easier.
