ou would have done if you could, by foul means if not fair. I
would not have it said I was forced to fight to shield that lady's
name--so I would have no witness if it could be helped. And you will
keep the encounter secret, for I command you."

Sir John started up, leaning upon his elbow, catching his breath, and
his wicked face a white flame.

"Curse you!" he shrieked again, blaspheming at a thing he had not
dreamed of, and which came upon him like a thunderbolt. "Curse your
soul--you love her!"

The deadly light danced--he saw it--in his Grace's eyes, but his
countenance was a marble mask with no human quiver of flesh in any
muscle of it.

"I command you," he went on; "having proved I can enforce. I have the
blood of savage devils in me, come down to me through many hundred
years. All my life I have kept them at bay. Until late I did not know
how savage they were and what they could make me feel. I could do to
you, as you lie there, things a man who is of this century, and sane,
cannot do. You know I can strike where I will. If you slight that
lady's name again I will not kill"--he raised himself from his sword
and stood his full height, the earliest gold of the sun shining about
him--"I will not kill you, but--so help me God!--I will fight with you
once more, and I will leave you so maimed and so disfigured that you
can woo no woman to ruin again and jest at her shame and agony with no
man--for none can bear to look at you without a shudder--and you will
lie and writhe to be given the _coup de grace_." He lifted the hilt of
his sword and kissed it. "That I swear," he said, "by this first
dawning of God's sun."

When later my lord Duke returned to the town and got his horse and rode
across the moors the shortest road to Camylott, he felt suddenly that
his body was slightly trembling. He looked down at his hands and saw
they were unsteady, and a strange look--as of a man slowly awakening
from a dream--- came over his face. 'Twas this he felt--as if the last
two hours he had lived in a dream or had been another man than himself,
perhaps some bloody de Mertoun, who had for ages been dry, light dust.
The devils which had been awake in him had been devils so awful as he
well knew--not devils to possess and tear a man in the days of good
Queen Anne, but such as, in times long past, possessed those who slew,
and hacked, and tortured, and felt an enemy a prey to be put to _peine
forte et dure_. He drew his glove acro