bold-eyed herdsman's wench who--be angry if you will, be angry if you will, but the truth's the truth--a wench who might well cook my dinner but never share eating it, and yet I am no Hellewyl of Solignac!" That he was talking as much against time as to ease his mind I knew, but there was so much sense in what he said that when he dropped my rein and sat back in the saddle I did not ride on. Of all the many leeches who sucked our Flanders' blood, none was bolder, greedier, more ruthless and more reckless than Jan Meert. Even into our remote life, stories drifted at which men cursed, but cursed softly, lest Jan Meert should catch and resent the echo; stories that for shame's sake we dared not tell our women, so wanton were they in cruelty, so brutal in destructiveness, and with such a wading in wickedness for very love of the thing. A Christian country? A fraction of the Empire? Bah! The Emperor was busy elsewhere, and there was neither law nor justice in the land, nothing but the naked arm of the strong. Those who had the conscience and the power to rob robbed, none making them afraid for this world or the next; in the war of factions the great were striving to grow yet greater, or, if might be, were hard put to it to hold their own, and had no leisure to hold Jan Meert and his like in check. He burned, he plundered, he ravaged, but always with circumspection, preying on the weaker, and who was I that I might hope to outface him even in defence of the house of my fathers? But, if to Jan Meert I was but a pigeon for a hawk's harrying, to Martin I was Hellewyl of Solignac, and his last words called for a rebuke. "You presume. Keep your scurrilous tongue quiet, or if you must talk, show all respect when you speak of the lady who----" "Lady! Has it come to that? Lady! God save us all! Slattern, black-eyed 'Gitta' a Lady? She'll never be that in God's world, it's not in her. Listen again, Monsieur Gaspard. A while back you stared--I saw you--when I thanked God for the woman. And I still thank Him, she kept you out of Solignac when you were best away. I suppose it was to that end the Lord made her--to save a Hellewyl of Solignac, and so even she has her uses. But now I say thank God for something worse than a----a----but we'll let that pass; why fret a green wound! You won't understand me now, still less will you understand me an hour hence, but the day'll come when you will know why I say God be thanked for Jan Meert, God be thanked for a burnt Solignac. From my heart I pray the scoundrel may have done his work well." There was a solemnity about his earnestness that gave his words weight, mad though they were, and, waiting his explanation, I made no answer. It came promptly.