"Sparmann at Antwerp and then at St. Trond--what was it seized on that vagabond and caused him to hold his hand and disappear?--and now Francbois here! Francbois, who was at the Lycée in Paris with me--the boy I sometimes beat for his impertinence regarding my countrymen, and to whom I sometimes gave a trifle for doing my impositions. And I did not know him this evening! Ah, well, 'tis not so strange either. Thirteen years have changed him much. If they have done the same for me, it may be that neither does he know me. And yet--and yet--I would be sworn he did. One glances not at another as he glanced at me without having good reason for't." As Bevill Bracton reflected, so the matter was. This Emile Francbois, this man who had stared so at him on the Quai as he went towards the Weiss Haus--this man who had undoubtedly followed him to that house, and peered in through the bars of the gate while evidently aghast at discovering that the other, whom he knew to be an Englishman, was also known to the woman whose love he desired--had been a schoolfellow of Bevill's in Paris. And, now, the latter recalled him, as he had done from the moment Sylvia uttered his name. He recalled the slight, sickly-looking boy who came from Limousin and dwelt with a priest outside the Lycée--the boy who told tales of his comrades both inside and outside of school that often earned for them beatings and punishments. Also, he recalled how preternaturally clever this boy was, how easily he mastered lessons and subjects that other scholars stumbled over, and how he made money by his wits, by doing the lessons and impositions of those others for them. "The man is," Bevill continued to muse, "what the boy has been; the boy is what the man will become. I doubt me not that as Emile Francbois was, so he is now. Crafty and clever, fawning and malignant. Ready to obtain money by any unclean trick. He knows my name; he will not have forgotten it--if he has, he will soon recall it. If there is aught to be earned by betraying, by denouncing me, then he will do it. I must find the means of silencing him. Yet how? Shall I give him money, or, better still, this," and he fingered the quillon of his sword as thus he meditated. "So he loves Sylvia, does he?" he went on, as now he drew near the 'Gouden Leeuw,' "and she despises him. Ah! 'tis very well; the game is afoot. If she does not set out soon for England with me, it is as like as not that I shall never set out at all. All the same, I will take no trouble in advance." After which he entered the inn, though not before he had looked well around to see if anyone--if Francbois--might be hovering near to spy on him; and so went to bed and slept peacefully.