ridge!"

He went and came again in half an hour. Then, indeed, though she had
spoken as if hope was dead in her, she was on her feet at the first sound
of his tread on the stairs; her parted lips and her white face questioned
him. He shook his head.

"There is a priest," he said in broken tones, "with them, whom God will
judge. It is his plan, and he is without mercy or pity."

"You bring nothing from--him?"

"They will not suffer him to write again."

"You did not see him?"

"No."

CHAPTER XXXV. AGAINST THE WALL.

In a room beside the gateway, into which, as the nearest and most
convenient place, Count Hannibal had been carried from his saddle, a man
sat sideways in the narrow embrasure of a loophole, to which his eyes
seemed glued. The room, which formed part of the oldest block of the
chateau, and was ordinarily the quarters of the Carlats, possessed two
other windows, deep-set indeed, yet superior to that through which
Bigot--for he it was--peered so persistently. But the larger windows
looked southwards, across the bay--at this moment the noon-high sun was
pouring his radiance through them; while the object which held Bigot's
gaze and fixed him to his irksome seat, lay elsewhere. The loophole
commanded the causeway leading shorewards; through it the Norman could
see who came and went, and even the cross-beam of the ugly object which
rose where the causeway touched the land.

On a flat truckle-bed behind the door lay Count Hannibal, his injured leg
protected from the coverlid by a kind of cage. His eyes were bright with
fever, and his untended beard and straggling hair heightened the wildness
of his aspect. But he was in possession of his senses; and as his gaze
passed from Bigot at the window to the old Free Companion, who sat on a
stool beside him, engaged in shaping a piece of wood into a splint, an
expression almost soft crept into his harsh face.

"Old fool!" he said. And his voice, though changed, had not lost all its
strength and harshness. "Did the Constable need a splint when you laid
him under the tower at Gaeta?"

The old man lifted his eyes from his task, and glanced through the
nearest window.

"It is long from noon to night," he said quietly, "and far from cup to
lip, my lord!"

"It would be if I had two legs," Tavannes answered, with a grimace, half-
snarl, half-smile. "As it is--where is that dagger? It leaves me every
minute."

It had slipped from the coverlid