to heart."

"But I want to know," Baudichon struck in, puffing pompously, "what is
to be done about--Basterga."

"Basterga? To be sure I was forgetting him," Fabri answered. "What is to
be done? What do you say, Messer Blondel? What are we to do about him?"

"I will tell you if you will tell me what the point is that touches him.
You forget, Messer Syndic"--with a somewhat sickly smile--"that I was
asleep."

"The letter," Fabri replied, returning to it, "touches him seriously. It
asserts that a person of that name is here in the Grand Duke's interest,
that he is in the secret of these plots, and that we should do well to
expel him, if we do not seize and imprison him."

"And you want to know----"

"I want to know," Baudichon answered, rolling in his chair as was his
habit when delivering himself, "what you know of him, Messer Blondel."

Blondel turned rudely on him, perhaps to hide a slight ebb of colour
from his cheeks. "What I know?" he said.

"Ay, ay."

"No more than you know!"

"But," Petitot retorted in his dry, thin voice, "it was you, Messer
Blondel, not Messer Baudichon, who gave him permission to reside in the
town."

"And I want to know," Baudichon chimed in remorselessly, "what
credentials he had. That is what I want to know!"

"Credentials? Oh, something formal! I don't know what," Blondel replied
rudely. He looked to the secretary who sat at the foot of the table. "Do
you know?" he asked.

"No, Messer Syndic," the man replied. "I remember that a licence was
granted to him in the name of Caesar Basterga, graduate of Padua; and
doubtless--for licences to reside are not granted without such--he had
letters, but I do not recall from whom. They would be returned to him
with the licence."

"And that is all," Petitot said, his long nose drooping, his inquisitive
eyes looking over his glasses, "that you know about him, Messer
Blondel?"

Did they know anything, and, if so, what did they know? Blondel
hesitated. This persistence, this continual harping on one point, began
to alarm him. But he carried it bravely. "Do you mean as to his
convictions?" he asked with a sneer.

"No, I mean at all!"

"I want to know," Baudichon added--the parrot phrase began to carry to
Blondel's ears the note of fate--"what you know about him."

This time a pause betrayed Blondel's hesitation. Should he admit that he
had been to Basterga's lodging; or dared he deny a fact that might imply
an intimacy greater than