my anger began to rise.

"You serve your master well," I sneered.

"I serve but my pleasure," was his answer. "Master I have none."

"Pardon me if I presume to tell you the truth," I said.

"Which is?" he queried softly.

"That you are a liar, Pasquini, a liar like all Italians."

He turned immediately to Lanfranc and Bohemond.

"You heard," he said. "And after that you cannot deny me him."

They hesitated and looked to me for counsel of my wishes. But Pasquini
did not wait.

"And if you still have any scruples," he hurried on, "then allow me to
remove them . . . thus."

And he spat in the grass at my feet. Then my anger seized me and was
beyond me. The red wrath I call it--an overwhelming, all-mastering
desire to kill and destroy. I forgot that Philippa waited for me in the
great hall. All I knew was my wrongs--the unpardonable interference in
my affairs by the gray old man, the errand of the priest, the insolence
of Fortini, the impudence of Villehardouin, and here Pasquini standing in
my way and spitting in the grass. I saw red. I thought red. I looked
upon all these creatures as rank and noisome growths that must be hewn
out of my path, out of the world. As a netted lion may rage against the
meshes, so raged I against these creatures. They were all about me. In
truth, I was in the trap. The one way out was to cut them down, to crush
them into the earth and stamp upon them.

"Very well," I said, calmly enough, although my passion was such that my
frame shook. "You first, Pasquini. And you next, de Goncourt? And at
the end, de Villehardouin?"

Each nodded in turn and Pasquini and I prepared to step aside.

"Since you are in haste," Henry Bohemond proposed to me, "and since there
are three of them and three of us, why not settle it at the one time?"

"Yes, yes," was Lanfranc's eager cry. "Do you take de Goncourt. De
Villehardouin for mine."

But I waved my good friends back.

"They are here by command," I explained. "It is I they desire so
strongly that by my faith I have caught the contagion of their desire, so
that now I want them and will have them for myself."

I had observed that Pasquini fretted at my delay of speech-making, and I
resolved to fret him further.

"You, Pasquini," I announced, "I shall settle with in short account. I
would not that you tarried while Fortini waits your companionship. You,
Raoul de Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in such bad