misplaced, but also exceedingly ill-suited to your ecclesiastical
pretensions."

"Hear me before we go farther," cried the Abbe John; "I am a good
Leaguer and a good Catholic, but I will not have it said that I am a
churchman just because my uncle is!"

The Professor paid no heed. Instead, he went to a corner cupboard of
ornate Spanish mahogany carved into dragons and gargoyles, and from it
he took the medal of the League, the portraits of the Duke of Guise and
of the King of Spain. Then, tying a white armlet of Alencon lace about
the dead man's wrist, he bade the Abbe John summon the servants.

The Abbe John stood opened-mouthed watching the preparations.

"I had always thought----" he began.

"Of course you had--of course you did. You all do, you half-baked
babies! You always take your instructors for ancient innocents,
purblind, adder-deaf mumblers of platitudes. But you are wrong--you and
Guy Launay, and all your like. A good professor is a man who has been a
good student, who remembers the tricks of the animal, and is all ready
fixed for them before the whisper has run along Bench One! I will
conduct this necessary funeral in person. Please do you, since you can
be of no other use, make it your business to explain matters to your
cousin!"

The servants of the Sorbonne, Leaguers to a man, at last appeared,
trickling upstairs half reluctantly. The Professor of Eloquence met them
at the door with a grave face.

"This man has been slain--accidentally," he began, "I believe by the
King's Swiss. I have brought him here myself. It will be as well for the
Sorbonne that these matters go no further--good for you, as well as for
myself, and for all the college of the Doctors, after the resolution of
which we know. Let Father Gontier be called, and the dead man interred
with all due ceremony in the private sepulchre of the faculty."

When the servitors of the Sorbonne had seen the half-hidden wristlet of
the good Leaguer, the medals of the two great chiefs, they understood.
After all, the King might win--and then--men might stay or flee, Guises
rise and set, but it was clearly the destiny of the Sorbonne to go on
for ever, if only to afford them a means of livelihood.

They were men with families, and the advantage of keeping a still tongue
in each several head had often been pointed out to them. It was, indeed,
a condition of their service at Sorbonne.

So the funeral of Francis the Scot took place in the strictes