ntastic
pattern against the skies.

Then came again the cultivated fields, hedges, ditches, the spiked
_agave_ dykes, over which he swung, using his long staff for a
leaping-pole--again the salt marshes, and lastly, the steep shingle and
blown sand of the sea.

Here the waves fell with a soft and cooling sound. Twenty miles of
heavy, grey-black salt water, the water of the Midland sea, statedly
said "Hush" to the stars.

Jean stopped and listened. There was no need for haste. Ten days, and
the task would need thinking over--how to get her, by Salses, to
Narbonne, where there was good French authority, and the protection of
the great lords of his own party. But he would succeed. He knew it. He
had never failed yet.

So Jean was at peace. The stars looked down, blinking sleepily through
various coloured prisms. The sea said so. You heard the wavelet run
along the shore, and the "Hush" dying out infinitesimally, as the
world's clamour dies into the silence of space.

But Jean-aux-Choux would have been a little less at ease, and put a
trifle more powder into his heels, had he known that the warrant of the
Holy Office which he carried in his pocket was only a first draft, and
that the actual document was already in the hands of the familiars, to
be executed at their peril. Also, that in this there was no question of
days, either of ten or any other number. The acolytes of the Black Robe
had a free hand.

* * * * *

The morning was coming up, all peach and primrose, out of the East,
reddening the port-waters of Collioure, and causing the white house of
La Masane, up on its hill, to blush, when Jean-aux-Choux leaped the wall
of his own sheepfold, and came suddenly upon a figure he knew well.

He saw a young man, bare of head, his steel cap, velvet-covered and
white-plumed, resting on a low turf dyke. He had laid aside his weapons,
all except his dagger, and with that he was cultivating and cherishing
his finger-nails. His heel was over the knee of his other leg, in that
pose which the young male sex can only attain with grace between the
ages of twenty and twenty-five.

"Hallo, Jean-aux-Choux!" he cried. "Here have I been waiting you for
hours and hours unnumbered. Is this the way you keep your master's
sheep? If I were that most scowling nobleman of the castle down there, I
would soon bid you travel. If it had not been for me, your sheep would
have been sore put to it for a mouthful,