ing for your vengeance, but I'm an older man than you, and have
learned how quickly the worst misfortunes and wrongs may be forgotten.
In your place I would leave this man to the punishment of his own
conscience."

Montaiglon laughed bitterly. "That," said he, "is to assume a mechanism
that in his case never existed. Pardon me, I pray you, but I prefer
the old reckoning, which will be all the fairer because he has the
reputation of being a good swordsman, and I am not without some
practice."

"And the man's name? you have not mentioned it."

"But there you puzzle me. He was eight months in France, six of these in
a lodging beside the Baigneurs on the Estrapade, Rue Dauphine. He came
with no credentials but from Glengarry, and now Glengarry can give no
account of him except that he had spoken familiarly to him of common
friends in the Highlands."

"Oh, Glengarry--Alasdair Rhuadh!" exclaimed the Baron, dryly.

"And presumed to be burdened with a dangerous name, he passed with the
name of Drimdarroch."

"Drimdarroch!" repeated the Baron with some apparent astonishment.

"I have never seen the man, so far as I know, for I was at Cammercy when
he hung about the lady."

"Drimdarroch!" repeated Doom reflectively, "a mere land title."

"And some words he dropped in the ear of the lady made me fancy he might
be found about the Court of Argyll."

"Drimdarroch! Drimdarroch! I ken no one of the name, though the name
itself, for very good reasons, is well known to me. Have you any
description of the man?"

"Not much. A man older than myself, dark, well-bred. I should say a man
something like yourself, if you will pardon the comparison, with a less
easy mind, if he remembers his friends and his past."

Doom pushed back his chair a little from the fire, but without taking
his eyes from the peats, and made a curious suggestion.

"You would not take it to be me, would you?" he asked.

Count Victor laughed, with a gesture of his hands that made denial all
unnecessary.

"Oh, but you do not know," went on the Baron. "Some months of caballing
with our friends--even our Hielan' friends--in the France, left me with
an unwholesome heart that would almost doubt my father in his grave. You
mentioned the name Drimdarroch--is it not the odd thing that you should
speak it to the only man in the shire that ever had the right to use it?
Do you see this?" and rising he stepped to a recess in the wall, only
half curtained, so that it