our
veins, Sir Richard!"

"Lady, if it stand with your pleasure, there is none but true Christian
blood in my veins!" was the proud reply.

"_Pure foy_! If you are so proud of your blood, I fear you will disdain
to do what I was about to bid you."

"I shall never disdain to execute the commands of a fair lady."

"My word, Sir Richard, but you are growing a courtly knight! You see
that Jew boy has left his cap behind. As there are none here but
damsels, I was thinking I would ask you to call him back to fetch it."

"He shall have it--a Jew boy! I'll take the tongs, then!"

The next minute Delecresse, who was just turning back to fetch the
forgotten cap, heard a boyish voice calling to him out of a window, and
looking up, saw his cap held out in the tongs.

"Here, thou cur of a Jew! What dost thou mean, to leave thy heathen
stuff in the chamber of a noble damsel?"

And the cap was dropped into the courtyard, with such good aim that it
first hit Delecresse on the head, and then lodged itself in the midst of
a puddle.

Delecresse, without uttering a word, yet flushing red even through his
dark complexion, deliberately stooped, recovered his wet cap, and placed
it on his head, pressing it firmly down as if he wished to impart the
moisture to his hair. Then he turned and looked fixedly at Richard, who
was watching him with an amused face.

"That wasn't a bad shot, was it?" cried the younger lad.

"Thank you," was the answer of Delecresse. "I shall know you again!"

The affront was a boyish freak, perpetrated rather in thoughtlessness
than malice: but the tone of the answer, however simple the words,
manifestly breathed revenge. Richard de Clare was not an ill-natured
boy. But he had been taught from his babyhood that a Jew was the scum
of the earth, and that to speak contumeliously to such was so far from
being wrong, that it absolutely savoured of piety. _Jews_ had crucified
Christ. To have aided one of them, or to have been over civil to him,
would in a Christian have been considered as putting a slight upon his
Lord. There was, therefore, some excuse for Richard, educated as he had
been in this belief.

Delecresse, on the contrary, had been as carefully brought up in the
opposite conviction. To him it was the Gentile who was the refuse of
humanity, and it was a perpetual humiliation to be forced to cringe to,
and wait upon, such contemptible creatures. Moreover, the day was
coming when their p