out my legs luxuriously, pleasantly
contemplating the stern yet kindly role I was to play: first send him
skulking, next enact the solemn father to this foolish maid. Then,
admonishing and smiling forgiveness in one breath, retire as gravely as
I entered--a highly interesting figure, magnanimous and moral----

A rapping at my chamber-door aroused me disagreeably from this
flattering rhapsody.

"Enter!" I said ungraciously, and lay back, frowning to see there in
the flesh the man whose punishment I had been complacently selecting.

"Mr. Renault," he said, "am I overbold in this intrusion on your
privacy? Pray, sir, command me, for my business must await your
pleasure."

I bowed, rising, and pointing to a chair. "It is business, then, not
pleasure, as I take it, Captain Butler, that permits me to receive
you?"

"The business and the pleasure both are mine, Mr. Renault," he said,
which was stilted enough to be civil. "The business, sir, is this: Sir
Henry Clinton received me like a gentleman, but as soon as Sir Peter
had retired he listened to me as though I were demented when I exposed
my plan to burn New York and take the field. I say he used me with
scant civility, and bowed me out, like the gross boor he is!"

"He is commander-in-chief, Mr. Butler."

"What do I care!" burst out Butler, his dark eyes a golden blaze. "Am I
not an Ormond-Butler? Why should a Clinton affront an Ormond-Butler? By
Heaven! I must swallow his airs and his stares and his shrugs because
he is my superior; but I may one day rise in military rank as high as
he--and I shall do so, mark me well, Mr. Renault!--and when I am near
enough in the tinseled hierarchy to reach him at thirty paces I shall
use the privilege, by God!"

"There are," said I blandly, "many subalterns on his staff who might
serve your present purpose, Captain Butler."

"No, no," he said impatiently, his dark eyes wandering about the
chamber, "I have too much at stake to call out fledglings for a sop to
injured pride. No, Mr. Renault, I shall first take vengeance for a
deeper wrong--and the north lies like an unreaped harvest for the
sickle that Death and I shall set a-swinging there."

I bent my head, meditating; then looking up:

"You say I know where this Thendara lies?"

"Yes," he answered sullenly. "You know as well as I do _what is written_
in the Book of Rites."

At first his words rang meaningless, then far in my memory a voice
called faintly, and a pale r