Gervase had found a little wine in a bottle and with this he moistened Macpherson´s lips from time to time. He lay motionless all day with his eyes half closed, but toward evening he seemed to Gervase to grow delirious, and began to talk in a rambling way, with a thick and broken utterance. His mind was busy with his old campaigning days, and his speech was full of foreign cities, and of battles and sieges and ambuscades, and of women he had loved in his wild free life. There was no coherence in the matter; only a meaningless confusion of unfamiliar names. Only once before had he raised the curtain that hung over his past life, but he had made no secret of the fact that his youth had been a riotous one and full of wayward passion; and he had seemed to have broken with it utterly. But now it had all come back again, and his mind was full of the tavern brawl and the low intrigue and the horrors of sack and siege. It was strange to hear the old man with the white head and haggard face that had grown so old looking in a day, babbling of the fierce delights of his youth as if he were living among them again. Gervase would willingly have closed his ears but he was in a manner fascinated by it. “A thousand devils, here they come. Lord, what a change! They ride as if Hell were loose after them. The pike men will never stand. Close down your ranks. There they go, rolling one after another. Pooh! a mere scratch. I´ll pour out my own wine and drink it too; a woman´s lips are sweeter after a draught like that. Open the windows; we want air--air and a song. Jack will----” Then he gave a loud cry and started up as if in pain. “Oh, God! I have killed him--wipe it off, that is his blood upon my sword--wipe it off, I tell you. You see how his eyes will not shut; they stare at me as if he were still alive. You she-devil, I will kill you as I killed him. I cannot draw this blade from the scabbard. Listen, and I will tell you why: his blood hath glued it fast, and I can never draw it again--never. Pooh! you are a fool.” So he rambled on, while Gervase sat compelled to listen and put together the history of that stirring and eventful life. Then the paroxysm died away, and exhausted with his passion he lay quiet, only his lips moving and his spare brown hands catching at the coverlet. Once or twice Gervase thought he heard his own name, but it might have been mere fancy, for it was now impossible to catch the words his lips tried to frame.