‘You are quite right,’ he went on in his cold voice. ‘I have a better case than that, and one eminently suited to a country such as Spain, where a long war has reduced law and order to a somewhat low ebb. I at first thought of coming here to await my chance of shooting this man—his name, by the way, is Frederick Conyngham; but circumstances placed a better vengeance within my grasp—one that will last longer.’ He paused for a moment to reflect upon this long-drawn-out expiation. ‘I propose to get my man home to England, and let him there stand his trial. The idea is not my own; it has, in fact, been carried out successfully before now. Once in England I shall make it my business to see that he gets twenty years’ penal servitude.’ ‘And how do you propose to get him to England?’ asked Conyngham. ‘Oh! that is simple enough. Only a matter of paying a couple of such scoundrels as I understand abound in Spain at this moment—a little bribing of officials, a heavy fee to some English ship-captain. I propose, in short, to kidnap Frederick Conyngham. But I do not ask you to help me in that. I only ask you to put me on his track—to help me to find him, in fact. Will you do it?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Conyngham, coming forward with a card in his hand. ‘You could not have come to a better man.’ Sir John Pleydell read the card, and had himself in such control that his face hardly changed. His teeth closed over his lower lip for a second; then he rose. The perspiration stood out on his face—the grey of his eyes seemed to have faded to the colour of ashes. He looked hard at Conyngham, and then, taking up his hat, went to the door with curious, uneven steps. On the threshold he turned. ‘Your insolence,’ he said breathlessly, ‘is only exceeded by your—daring.’ As the door closed behind him there came, from that part of the room where General Vincente sat, a muffled click of steel, as if a sword half out of its scabbard had been sent softly home again. CHAPTER XVII IN MADRID ‘Some keepeth silence knowing his time.’ ‘WHO travels slowly may arrive too late,’ said the Padre Concha, with a pessimistic shake of the head, as the carrier’s cart in which he had come from Toledo drew up in the Plazuela de la Cebada at Madrid. The careful penury of many years had not, indeed, enabled the old priest to travel by the quick diligences, which had often passed him on the road with a cloud of dust and the rattle of six horses. The great journey had been accomplished in the humbler vehicles plying from town to town, that ran as often as not by night in order to save the horses. The priest, like his fellow-travellers, was white with dust. Dust covered his cloak so that its original hue of rusty black was quite lost. Dust coated his face and nestled in the deep wrinkles of it. His eyebrows were lost to sight, and his lashes were like those of a miller.