r way, and over which the clematis tangled its twining stems.

"Stand up and prove on my body that I am a rank Irelander," Laurence
was saying defiantly to the world at large, with his fists up and his
head thrown back. "Saint Christopher, but I will take the lot of you
with one hand tied behind me. Stand up and I will teach you how to
sing 'Miserable sinners are we all!' to a new and unkenned tune."

"'Tis easy for you to boast, Irelander," retorted Blaise Renouf, the
son of the lay choir-master, who had been brought specially from Rome
to teach the choir-boys of the marshal's chapel the latest fashions in
holy song. "We will either fight you with swords or not at all. We do
not fight with our bare knuckles, being civilised. And that indeed
proves that you are no true lover of the French, but an English dog of
unknightly birth."

This retort still further irritated the hot-headed son of Malise.

"I will fight you or any galley slave of a French frog with the sword,
or spit you upon the rapier. I will cleave you with the axe, transfix
you with the arrow, or blow you to the pit with the devil's sulphur. I
will fight any of you or all of you with any weapons from a
battering-ram to a toothpick--and God assist the better man. And there
you have Laurence O'Halloran, at your service!"

"You are a loud-crowing young cock for a newcomer," said Henriet, the
confidential clerk of the marshal, suddenly appearing in the doorway;
"you are desired to follow me to my lord's chamber immediately. There
we will see if you will flap your wings so boldly."

Laurence could not help noticing the blank alarm which this
announcement caused among the youth with whom he had been playing the
ancient game of brag.

It was Blaise Renouf who first recovered. He looked across the little
rose-grown space of the cloister to see that Henriet had turned his
back, and then came quickly up to Laurence MacKim.

"Listen to me," he said; "you are a game lad enough, but you do not
know where you are going, nor yet what may happen to you there. We
will fight you if you come back safe, but meantime you are one of
ourselves, and we of the choir have sworn to stand by one another. Can
you keep a pea in your mouth without swallowing it?"

"Why, of course I can," said Laurence, wondering what was to come
next. "I can keep a dozen and shoot them through a bore of alder tree
at a penny without missing once, which I wot is more than any
Frenchman ever--"