y hands on
his godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is
sheer knight-errantry--moonshine, lunacy. You'll come to no good by it if
you persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when
he went tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither
more nor less. Leave things as they are, my boy. I wouldn't have a
mischief happen to you."

Andre-Louis looked at him, smiling wanly.

"I swore an oath to-day which it would damn my soul to break."

"You mean that you'll go in spite of anything that I may say?" Impetuous
as he was inconsequent, M. de Kercadiou was bristling again. "Very well,
then, go... Go to the devil!"

"I will begin with the King's Lieutenant."

"And if you get into the trouble you are seeking, don't come whimpering
to me for assistance," the seigneur stormed. He was very angry now.
"Since you choose to disobey me, you can break your empty head against
the windmill, and be damned to you."

Andre-Louis bowed with a touch of irony, and reached the door.

"If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the
threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind. Good-bye, monsieur
my godfather."

He was gone, and M. de Kercadiou was alone, purple in the face, puzzling
out that last cryptic utterance, and not at all happy in his mind,
either on the score of his godson or of M. de La Tour d'Azyr. He was
disposed to be angry with them both. He found these headstrong, wilful
men who relentlessly followed their own impulses very disturbing and
irritating. Himself he loved his ease, and to be at peace with his
neighbours; and that seemed to him so obviously the supreme good of life
that he was disposed to brand them as fools who troubled to seek other
things.

CHAPTER VI. THE WINDMILL

There was between Nantes and Rennes an established service of three
stage-coaches weekly in each direction, which for a sum of twenty-four
livres--roughly, the equivalent of an English guinea--would carry you the
seventy and odd miles of the journey in some fourteen hours. Once a week
one of the diligences going in each direction would swerve aside
from the highroad to call at Gavrillac, to bring and take letters,
newspapers, and sometimes passengers. It was usually by this coach
that Andre-Louis came and went when the occasion offered. At present,
however, he was too much in haste to lose a day awaiting the passing of
that diligence. So it was on a h