"As you please, then," he continued, readjusting his garments with punctilious care. "I must warn you, however, that standing so long in this chilly air may mean the influenza for me. By the Shining One! if we keep on like this the interest due on our little account is likely to exceed in amount the original principal. That would be a pity as happening between gentlemen, who know naturally nothing of what they call business and have no desire to cheat each other." [Illustration: "AN INSTANT LATER THE BOWSTRING TWANGED"] Then he laughed heartily, unaffectedly. "What a comedy! and you and I cast for the fools in it. Which is the bigger one neither of us should be willing to say. And for the best of reasons, we don't know. My compliments, brother imbecile, and so good-day." Quinton Edge doffed his hat as though to intimate that the interview was at an end, then stepped lightly across the hedge of arrows and proceeded at an even pace to the eastern angle of the fortress, around which he disappeared. Ulick's eyes were sparkling as he turned to Constans. "He is at least a man," he said, half proudly, half enviously. But Constans only set his teeth the harder. "I could have gone out, met him face to face and killed him," he said, sombrely, "only for you and your Esmay." XIII GODS IN EXILE February, and a full three months since Constans had come to Doom. And yet he was virtually at his starting-point, so little had he been able to accomplish along the line of his purpose. A dozen times indeed he might have planted an arrow between the delicately shrugged shoulders of Master Quinton Edge as he strolled, of a sunshiny morning, along the Palace Road, surrounded by his little body-guard of flatterers and political courtiers. But such an act would have stained his honor without fully satisfying his vengeance; he did not want to strike until he should know where it would hurt the most. It had been Ulick always who had stood in the road; Ulick with his eternal lamentations over the maid Esmay. Together they had searched for her in every possible quarter. But where was one to look first in this wilderness of stone? It would have been an obvious procedure to have kept close watch upon the movements of Quinton Edge, whose complicity was a matter of reasonable suspicion. But the first attempts at shadowing him had resulted in nothing, and early in December the _Black Swan_, with Quinton Edge himself in command, had left her moorings in the Greater river, bound doubtless on some piratical expedition.