Mr. Lowther struck his small white hand lightly upon his friend’s shoulder as he concluded. Francis had dropped into the place offered to him, and sat there, looking like nothing _but_ the Commander, in his stony rigidity of face and figure. As Harcourt Lowther’s hand alighted on his shoulder, he startled every one by throwing it deliberately away from him. “I have had enough of your friendship, thank you,” he said; “henceforward, if we are to be anything at all to each other, I had rather we should be foes--I may have better luck perhaps that way.” “Tredethlyn! are you drunk? or mad?” “Neither, but I _have_ been both; for I have trusted you. You needn’t ask me what I mean,” said Francis, interrupting Harcourt Lowther’s exclamation by a rapid gesture of his uplifted hand; “I am going to tell you, and very plainly. Gentlemen, you were going to listen to a song just now; have you any objection to hearing a story instead? There will be time for your ballad afterwards, you know, Philcote. My story is not a long one.” Harcourt Lowther had turned very pale. His light blue eyes glittered, and the slim white fingers of his right hand closed involuntarily on the knife that had been lying near them. He looked as a man might look, who marching proudly upon the road to victory, saw the earth yawn asunder beneath his feet, and knew all at once that his next step must hurl him to a dreadful death. He was very quiet; but the quivering of his thin nostrils, the quickening of his breath, and his faded colour, betrayed a degree of hesitation which set his guests wondering, and infused a dash of excitement into the wind-up of the little banquet. The highest development of Christianity cannot quite extinguish the natural savage. Cromwell’s Ironsides did murderous work with the gospel in their wallets and pious exclamations upon their lips; and it seems the attribute of human nature to delight in a row. The guests at Harcourt Lowther’s supper-table pricked up their ears with one accord, and it was with considerable difficulty that they managed to keep up a faint attempt at that kind of conversation which had engaged them, in twos and threes, before Francis Tredethlyn’s entrance. When they spoke to one another now, it was only in undertones, and their disjointed sentences revealed the fact that they were listening to the speaker at the end of the table. But when Francis spoke of telling a story, the company dropped all pretence of indifference to him; and listened with a polite appearance of perfect unconsciousness as to any unfriendly intention on the part of the late visitor. “Sing your song, Philcote,” said Harcourt Lowther, resolutely; “we want no stories--we’ve no time for twaddle of that sort. Let’s have a good song or two, and then we’ll go into the next room for a rubber.”