more bitterness because the men had
in the interval come to respect if not to like him. They resented the
deception they believed to have been practised upon them with the
rancour of those who find they have not only been played upon but made
tools of. Rallywood had gained his position among them by false
pretences to serve his own ends--gained it to betray them.

But more than this, he had dishonoured the Guard, brought the first blot
of treachery upon its long and unblemished traditions. Hereditary
instincts inbred and powerful were arrayed against him in the hearts of
six of his judges; in the seventh, Count Sagan, he had to encounter the
ill-blood of a profoundly vindictive nature whose purposes he had
crossed and baffled, and who harboured towards him a savage personal
hatred.

It must be understood that so far no hint of the arrangement with
England had been allowed to transpire. The engagement to be given by
Maasau in return for the promised British loan and moral support was in
train for completion, but the final signature was not to take place till
that afternoon. Meantime the Chancellor kept a still tongue in his head
and waited upon events, knowing that when all transpired the
responsibility could be shifted on to the shoulders of the Duke. It was
a risky game, but M. Selpdorf had played many another--and won them all.
At the same time he had no intention of putting out his hand to save
Rallywood, whose disappearance from the scheme of earthly affairs would
remove an awkward cause of disagreement from the range of his own family
circle. Yet it must be admitted that M. Selpdorf really regretted that
the necessities of the case required the sacrifice of the Englishman,
for whom his former abstract liking remained entirely unaltered.

The doors of the great mess-room were closed, for within them the
court-martial was in progress. At the central table seven men with the
marks of power upon them were gathered. Above them the torn banners of
the regiment hung in the red gloom of the dome, but about the men
themselves the gray-white light of a winter day fell from the riverward
windows. It seemed to dull even the red glow of the hangings, that cold
light, which lent to the faces of those assembled a strange effect of
pallor.

It is a common experience that silence in a place associated in the mind
with voices and the movement and sounds of life has a weird and
impressive effect. Enter an empty church and you are