"Lord, it is the hare-brained Frenchman!" cried Rollo, yet with some glow of pleasure in his face. The very talk of fighting stirred him. "Then there are a pair of you!" said John Mortimer, quietly, like a man dropping his fly into a pool on a clear evening. "Eh, what's that?" angrily cried the Scot, but was diverted from further inquiry by the sight of a figure that darted forward out of the darkness of the wall. A smallish slender man, dressed in a costume which would have recalled the Barber of Seville, had it not been for the ecclesiastical robe that surmounted and as it were extinguished its silken gorgeousness. A great cross of gold set with jewels swung at the young man's breast and was upheld by links as large as those which sustain a lord mayor's badge of office. "Ah, I have renounced the world, my dear adversary," cried the new-comer enthusiastically, "as you will also. I am no longer Etienne de Saint Pierre, but Brother Hilario, an unworthy novice of the Convent of the Virgin of Montblanch!" "But, sir," cried Rollo Blair, "you cannot take up the religious life without some small settlement with me. You are trysted to meet me with the smallsword at the Buttes of Montmartre--you to fight for the honour of Senorita Concha of Sarria and I to make a hole in your skin for the sweet sake of little Peggy Ramsay, who broke my heart or ever I left the bonny woods o' Alyth to wander on this foreign shore!" "Your claim I allow, my dear Sir Blair," cried the Frenchman, "but the eternal concerns of the soul come first, and I have been wicked--wicked--so very wicked--or at least as wicked as my health (which is indifferent) would allow. But the holy Prior--the abbot--mine uncle, hath shown me the error of my ways!" John Mortimer turned directly round till he faced the speaker. "Odds bobs," he cried, "then after all there is a pair of them. _He is this fellow's uncle too!_" The Frenchman gazed at him amazed for a moment. Then he clapped his hand fiercely on the place where his sword-hilt should have been, crying, "I would have you know, Monsieur, that the word of a Saint Pierre is sacred. I carry in my veins the blood of kings!" And he grappled fiercely for the missing sword-hilt, but his fingers encountering only the great jewelled cross of gold filigree work, he raised it to his lips with a sudden revulsion of feeling. "Torrentes iniquitatis conturbaverunt me. Dolores inferni circumdederunt me." He spoke these words solemnly, shaking his head as he did so. "What! still harping on little Dolores?" cried Blair; "I thought little Concha was your last--before Holy Church, I mean." The little Frenchman was beneath the lamps and he looked up at the long lean Scot with a peculiarly sweet smile. "Ah, you scoff," he said, "but you will learn--yes, you will learn. My uncle, the Prior, will teach you. He will show you the Way, as he has done for me!"