"If I am wrong, so much the worse for Spain. But if the guest were indeed the usurper"—and here he paused and searched my face as if for confirmation of his hazard, but he might as well have counted the stones in a wall—"if, I say, then the mountain spot I mean would hold him as fast as his officers would hold us in his strongest prison had they wind of this scheme. Do you wonder that my blood burns with excitement for the day to dawn?" "You have done your task thoroughly," I said, with the same air of reserve; and his face flushed with pleasure at the praise. Then I added with great sternness, "But now I have a word for you. You have done wrong, very wrong, to breathe a word of this even to me. You have been untrue to your duty. For all you could tell I might be a traitor worming this knowledge out of you for evil purposes. You heard my name by chance, you followed me and found me out, and with scarce a word of question from me you have tumbled pell-mell into my lap secrets that should have been kept with the closeness of the charnel house. Shame upon your gossiping tongue and your falseness to your oath. You would have shown yourself worthier of the trust we place in you had you set me at defiance, and, when I questioned, refused even at the dagger’s point to breathe a word of answer. From now I shall watch you. I will give you another chance. Go back to your work, breathe no syllable of what has happened here: that you have even seen or spoken to me: look on the very walls of your house and the very stones of the street as listeners, watchers, spies, ready to catch your words and bring them to me; and if you value your life, pluck out your tongue rather than let it ever again betray you." I have seldom seen a man more thunderstruck and bewildered. He turned white to the lips and trembled violently, and his hands clasped the arms of his chair for support, while his eyes, terror-wide, appealed to me with the prayer for forgiveness his quivering lips refused to utter. I feared I had overstrung the bow indeed, and filling a tumbler of wine, I handed it to him and said, relaxing the sternness of my looks: "Do as I bid you, and I will at no distant date send you a sign that you have regained my confidence;" and with this hope to counterbalance his abject fear, I dismissed him. Then—shall I confess it?—I did a very boyish thing. Full of a curiosity to know how I had looked when frightening the Carlist so successfully, I postured and mouthed and frowned at and rated myself before a mirror much as I had with Pelayo, and laughed with much satisfaction at what I considered an excellent impersonation. "By Gad, old chap," I exclaimed, with a nod to myself in the mirror, "if diplomacy fails, you’ll do something on the stage, and what’s more, I’ll be hanged if I didn’t feel that I meant it all the while I was giving it him." And then I became serious again. *CHAPTER VII*