ngs.'

'I have so little liking for your schemes, to be plain with you,'
replied the Archduke, 'that they may fail and fail again for me. How I
deal with the King of England, who has insulted me beyond hope, is a
matter for him and me to determine.'

'Cousin,' said Montferrat, 'you desert me.'

'Cousin again,' said the Archduke, 'do you wonder?' And so he walked
out.

'Punctilious boar!' cried Saint-Pol in a fume, 'who can only get his
tushes in one way! Now, Marquess, what are we to do?'

The Marquess smiled darkly, and tapped his nose. 'I have my business in
good train. I have an ancient friend on Lebanon. Stand in with me, the
pair of you, and I have all done smoothly.'

'You hire?' asked Saint-Pol, drily. Then he shrugged--'Oh, but we may
trust you!'

'Per la Madonna!' said the Marquess.

'What will you do, Gilles?' Saint-Pol asked the Norman. 'Will you leave
it to the Marquess of Montferrat?'

'I will not,' said Gilles. 'I follow King Richard from point to point. I
hire nobody.'

The Marquess's hands went up, desperate of such folly. 'You only with
me, my Eustace!' he said.

Saint-Pol looked up. 'I differ from either. I have a finer plan than
either. You are satisfied with a sword-stroke in the back--'

'By my soul, it shall not be in the back!' cried De Gurdun. Saint-Pol
shrugged again.

'That is the Marquess's way. But what matter? You want to see him down.
So do I, by heaven, but in hell, not on the earth. I will see him
tormented. I will see him ashamed. I will wreck his hopes. I will make
him a mockery of all kings, drag his high spirit through the mud of
disastrousness. Pouf! Do you think him all flesh? He is finer stuff than
that. What he makes others I seek to make him-soiled, defiled, a blown
rag. There is work to be done in that kind here and at home. King Philip
will see to one; I stay with the host.'

'It is a good plan,' said the Marquess; 'I admire it exceedingly. But
steel is safer for a common man. I go to Lebanon, for my part, to my
friends there. But I think we are in agreement.'

Before they went away, they cut their arms with a dagger, and mingled
their blood. The Marquess wrapped his wound deep in his cloak to keep
the flies from it. Across the silence of the night, as they made their
way into the city, came the cry of the watchman from a belfry: 'Save us,
Holy Sepulchre!' It floated from tower to tower, from land far out to
sea. Jehane, dry in her hot bed, heard it; Richard