The young heart beat so fast, rose so high in his throat, that the words pulsed from his lips in jerks, broken with quick breaths. He drew his rapier with an almost frenzied gesture as he spoke; dashing baldrick and scabbard on one side; falling back to swing the blade with dire menace and then springing forward again, high-poised, tiptoe, only the elementary rules of honour keeping him from assault until his enemy should have likewise unsheathed. A second or two, marked by the lad’s panting, Lord Rockhurst fixed him through half-closed eyelids. Then, without a word, with a dexterous, irresistible, upstroke of his cane, he knocked the weapon from the fierce hand. The springy steel fell and bounded like a live thing on the flagged path, to drop again, quivering, close to Rockhurst, who, with a lightning swiftness unexpected from one of such majestic bearing, instantly clapped his foot upon it. Then the whole precincts of the garden, it seemed, were filled with the thunder of his voice:— “Malapert…!” The Lord Constable’s brows were now drawn over his keen eyes in a withering frown. “This cane of mine should teach your youthship better manners were it not for this same strangerhood of yours, on which you thus presume! Aye, and you should have remembered this day, even with stripes, but that some freak of your Maker’s hath given you, graceless lad as you are, Vidame, a singular look of my own gracious son. For his so sweet sake … thou varlet … I spare thee. Yet will this hour have taught thee that his Majesty’s officers are not to be molested with impunity—that the Page of the Wine Flagon can have no satisfaction to demand of the King’s Lord Constable, what though his petty vanity may be a-smarting from some imagined slights.—Slights, quotha! Young master,—there can be no slights from me to you…! And for this insolence of yours to me, take you home this memento.” With another of his startlingly sudden movements, Rockhurst stooped for the hilt of the sword that lay bent under his foot; and snapped the blade in twain, with as much ease as one may snap a twig. Tossing the hilt back at the Vidame’s feet, he went on—and it seemed that his anger had but gathered in intensity with the action:— “Hang yonder stump of steel in your bedchamber: it may serve to remind you of a fruitful lesson learned in the Temple Gardens—how the satisfaction fit for a pert page’s receiving is a sound whipping, and how you, of my mercy, escaped receiving it!” He stepped from the broken blade, passed the boy’s rigid figure so closely and indifferently as to brush him with his cloak, and set his deliberate way again toward the Temple Hall. * * * * *