time I ask you--why
are you here with my new-wed wife and at this hour of the night?"

"So courteous a question demands a courteous answer, Master merchant,
but to give it I must trouble you to listen to a tale."

"Then let it be like my patience, brief," I replied.

"It shall," he said with a mocking bow.

Then very clearly and quietly he set out a dreadful story, giving dates
and circumstances. Let that story be. The substance of it was that he
had married Blanche soon after she reached womanhood and that she had
borne him a child which died.

"Blanche," I said when he had done, "you have heard. Is this true?"

"Much of it is true," she answered in that strange, cold voice, still
staring at the fire. "Only the marriage was a false one by which I
was deceived. He who celebrated it was a companion of the Lord Deleroy
tricked out as a priest."

"Do not let us wrangle of this matter," said Deleroy. "A man who mixes
with the world like yourself, Master merchant, will know that women in a
trap rarely lack excuses. Still if it be admitted that this marriage
did not fulfil all formalities, then so much the better for Blanche
and myself. If she be your lawful wife and not mine, you, I learn, have
signed a writing in her favour under which she will inherit your great
wealth. That indenture I think you can find no opportunity to dispute,
and if you do I have a promise that the property of a certain traitor
shall pass to me, the revealer of his treachery. Let it console you in
your last moments, Master merchant, to remember that the lady whom you
have honoured with your fancy will pass her days in wealth and comfort
in the company of him whom she has honoured with her love."

"Draw!" I said briefly as I unsheathed my sword.

"Why should I fight with a base, trading usurer?" he asked, still
mocking me, though I thought that there was doubt in his voice.

"Answer your own question, thief. Fight if you will, or die without
fighting if you will not. For know that until I am dead you do not leave
this room living."

"Until I dead too, O Lord," broke in Kari in his gentle voice, bowing in
his courteous foreign fashion.

As he did so with a sudden motion Kari shook the cloak back from his
body and for the first time I saw that thrust through his leathern belt
was a long weapon, half sword and half dagger, also that its sharpened
steel was bare.

"Oh!" exclaimed Deleroy, "now I understand that I am trapped and that
when