tion is the rarest and loftiest of qualities, and he has got more
of it than any other man in France--more of it, perhaps, than any other
sixty men in France."

"Now you are getting ready to make a fool of yourself, Noel Rainguesson,"
said the Paladin, "and you want to coil some of that long tongue of yours
around your neck and stick the end of it in your ear, then you'll be the
less likely to get into trouble."

"I didn't know he had more discretion than other people," said Pierre,
"for discretion argues brains, and he hasn't any more brains than the
rest of us, in my opinion."

"No, you are wrong there. Discretion hasn't anything to do with brains;
brains are an obstruction to it, for it does not reason, it feels.
Perfect discretion means absence of brains. Discretion is a quality of
the heart--solely a quality of the heart; it acts upon us through
feeling. We know this because if it were an intellectual quality it would
only perceive a danger, for instance, where a danger exists; whereas--"

"Hear him twaddle--the damned idiot!" muttered the Paladin.

"--whereas, it being purely a quality of the heart, and proceeding by
feeling, not reason, its reach is correspondingly wider and sublimer,
enabling it to perceive and avoid dangers that haven't any existence at
all; as, for instance, that night in the fog, when the Paladin took his
horse's ears for hostile lances and got off and climbed a tree--"

"It's a lie! a lie without shadow of foundation, and I call upon you all
to beware you give credence to the malicious inventions of this
ramshackle slander-mill that has been doing its best to destroy my
character for years, and will grind up your own reputations for you next.
I got off to tighten my saddle-girth--I wish I may die in my tracks if it
isn't so--and whoever wants to believe it can, and whoever don't can let
it alone."

"There, that is the way with him, you see; he never can discuss a theme
temperately, but always flies off the handle and becomes disagreeable.
And you notice his defect of memory. He remembers getting off his horse,
but forgets all the rest, even the tree. But that is natural; he would
remember getting off the horse because he was so used to doing it. He
always did it when there was an alarm and the clash of arms at the
front."

"Why did he choose that time for it?" asked Jean.

"I don't know. To tighten up his girth, he thinks, to climb a tree, I
think; I saw him climb nine trees in a s