delusion that proof of it."

66

your

duel with the Frenchman was the

Oh, damn the Frenchman!" cried the Chamberlain with contempt and irritation. "I am ready to meet the man again with any arm he chooses."

With any arm! said the Duke drily. "Tis always well to have a whole one, and not one with a festering sore, as on the last occasion. Oh yes,” he went on, seeing Simon change colour, "you observe I have learned about the old wound, and, what is more, I know exactly where you got it."

"Your Grace seems to have trustworthy informants," said the Chamberlain less boldly, but in no measure abashed. "I got that wound through your own hand as surely as if you had held the foil that gave it, for the whole of this has risen, as you ought to know, from your sending me to France."

And that is true, in a sense, my good sophist. But I was, in that, the unconscious and blameless link in your accursed destiny. I had you sent to France on a plain mission. It was not, I make bold to say, a mission on which the Government would have sent any man but a shrewd one and a gentleman, and I was mad enough to think Simon MacTaggart was both. When you were in Paris as our agent

"Fah!" cried Simon, snapping his fingers and drawing his face in a grimace. "Agent, quo' he! for God's sake take your share of it and say spy and be done with it!"

The Duke shrugged his shoulders, listening patiently to the interruption. "As you like," said he. "Let us say spy, then. You were to learn what you could of the Pretender's movements, and incidentally you were to intromit with certain of our settled agents at Versailles. Doubtless a sort of espionage was necessary to the same. But I make bold to say the duty was no ignoble one so long as it was done with some sincerity and courage, for I count the spy in an enemy's country

is engaged upon the gallantest enterprise of war, using the shrewdness that alone differs the quarrel of the man from the fury of the beast, and himself the more admirable because his task is a thousand times more dangerous than if he fought with the claymore in the field."

"Doubtless! doubtless!" said the Chamberlain. "That's an old tale between the two of us, but you should hear the other side upon it."

"No matter; we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart-and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us-there's the long and the short of it; and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. Countersap with a vengeance! We know now where Bertin got his information. You betrayed us and the woman Cécile Favart in the one filthy transaction."

The Chamberlain showed in his face that the blow was home. His mouth broke, and he grew as grey as a rag.

"And that's the way of it?" he said, after a moment's silence.

"She

"That's the way of it," said the Duke. was as much the agent-let us say the spy, thenas you were yourself, and seems to have brought more cunning to the trade than did our simple Simon himself. If her friend Montaiglon had not come here to look for you, and thereby put us on an old trail we had abandoned, we would never have guessed the source of her information."

"I'll be cursed if I have a dog's luck!" cried Simon.

Argyll looked pityingly at him. "So!" said he. "You mind our old country saying, Ni droch dhuine dàn da féin—a bad man makes his own fate ? ”

"Do you say so?" cried MacTaggart, with his first sign of actual insolence, and the Duke sighed.

"My good Simon," said he, "I do not require to tell you so, for you know it very well. What I would add is that all I have said is, so far as I am concerned, between ourselves: that's my only tribute to our old acquaintanceship. Only I can afford to have no more night escapades at Doom or anywhere else with my fencibles, and so, Simon, the resignation cannot be a day too soon."

"Heaven forbid that I should delay it a second longer than is desirable, and your Grace has it here and now! A fine fracas all this about a puddockeating Frenchman! I do not value him nor his race to the extent of a pin. And as for your Grace's Chamberlain-well, Simon MacTaggart has done very well hitherto on his own works and merits."

"You may find, for all that," said his Grace, "that they were all summed up in a few words—‘he was a far-out cousin to the Duke.' Sic itur ad astra."

At that Simon put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as he descended.

"The man is fey," said the Duke to himself, listening with a startled gravity.

CHAPTER XLI.

DAWN.

SIMON MACTAGGART went out possessed by the devils of hatred and chagrin. He saw himself plainly for what he was in truth—a pricked bladder, his career come to an ignoble conclusion, the single honest scheme he had ever set his heart on brought ' to nought, and his vanity already wounded sorely at the prospect of a contemptuous world to be faced for the remainder of his days. All this from the romantics of a Frenchman who walked through life in the step of a polonaise, and a short season ago was utterly unaware that such a man as Simon MacTaggart existed, or that a woman named Olivia bloomed, a very flower, among the wilds! At whatever angle he viewed the congregated disasters of the past few weeks he saw Count Victor in their background-a sardonic, smiling, light-hearted Nemesis; and if he detested him previously as a merely possible danger, he hated him now with. every fibre of his being as the cause of this upheaval.

And then, in his way, that is not uncommon with the sinner, he must pity himself because circumstances had so consistently conspired against him.

He had come into the garden after the interview with Argyll had made it plain that the darkest passages in his servant's history were known to him, and had taken off his hat to get the night breeze on his brow which was wet with perspiration.

The snow was still on the ground; among the laden bushes, the silent soaring trees of fir and ash, it seemed as if this was no other than the land of outer darkness whereto the lost are driven at the end. It maddened him to think of what he had been brought to: he shook his fist in a childish and impotent petulance at the spacious unregarding east where Doom lay-the scene of all his passions.

"God's curse on the breed of meddlers!" he said. "Another month and I was out of these gutters, and Hell no more to tempt me. To be the douce goodman, and all the tales of storm forgotten by the neighbours that may have kent them; to sit perhaps with bairns-her bairns and mine-about my knee, and never a twinge of the old damnable inclinations, and the flageolet going to the honestest tunes. All lost! All lost for a rat that takes to the hold of an infernal ship, and comes here to chew at the ropes that dragged me to salvation. This is where it ends! It's the judgment come a day ower soon for Sim MacTaggart. But Sim MacTaggart will make the rat rue his meddling."

He had come out with no fixed idea of what he next should do, but one step seemed now imperative -he must go to Doom, otherwise his blood would burst every vein in his body. He set forth with the stimulus of fury for the barracks where his men lay, of whom half-a-dozen at least were his to the gate of the Pit itself, less scrupulous even than himself because more ignorant, possessed of but one or two impulses a foolish affection for him and an inherited regard for rapine too rarely to be indulged in these tame latter days. To call them out, to find them armed and ready for any enterprise of his, was a matter of brief time. They set out knowing nothing at all of his object, and indifferent so long as this adorable gentleman was to lead them.

When they came to Doom the tide was full and round about it, so they retired upon the hillside, sheltering in a littie plantation of fir through which