three times, with the
right hand. _Ma foi!_ I remember it well! I offered the master twenty
guineas, Monsieur, if he would teach it me. But because"--he held out
his palms pathetically--"I was right-handed, he would not."

"I am fortunate," Colonel John answered, bowing, and regarding his
opponent with kind eyes, "in being able to requite your good nature. I
shall be pleased to teach it you for nothing, but not now. Gentlemen,"
he continued, giving up his foil to Lemoine, and removing his mask,
"gentlemen, you will bear me witness, I trust, that I have won the
wager?"

Some nodded, some murmured an affirmative, others turned towards
Payton, who, too deeply chagrined to speak, nodded sullenly. How
willingly at that moment would he have laid the Colonel dead at his
feet, and Lemoine, and the whole crew, friends and enemies! He gulped
something down. "Oh, d--n you!" he said, "I give it you! Take the mare,
she's in the stable!"

At that a brother officer touched his arm, and, disregarding his
gesture of impatience, drew him aside. The intervener seemed to be
reminding him of something; and the Colonel, not inattentive, and
indeed suspicious, caught the name "Asgill" twice repeated. But Payton
was too angry to care for minor consequences, or to regard anything but
how he might most quickly escape from the scene of defeat and the eyes
of those who had witnessed his downfall. He shook off his adviser with
a rough hand.

"What do I care?" he answered with an oath. "He must shoe his own
cattle!" Then, with a poor show of hiding his spite under a cloak of
insouciance, he addressed the Colonel. "The mare is yours," he said.
"You've won her. Much good may she do you!"

And he turned on his heel and went out of the armoury.

CHAPTER VII

BARGAINING

The melancholy which underlies the Celtic temperament finds something
congenial in the shadows that at close of day fall about an old ruin.
On fine summer evenings, and sometimes when the south-wester was
hurling sheets of rain from hill to hill, and the birch-trees were
bending low before its blast, Flavia would seek the round tower that
stood on the ledge beside the waterfall. It was as much as half a mile
from the house, and the track which scaled the broken ground to its
foot was rough. But from the narrow terrace before the wall the eye not
only commanded the valley in all its length, but embraced above one
shoulder a distant view of Brandon Mountain, and above th