ssion. It never occurred to him that Philip
might refuse.

On the same afternoon he sent for Philip to come to him in the highest
room of the great tower. It was in this room that, many years ago, the
Duke's young and noble wife, from the province of Aquitaine, had given
birth to the second son of the house of Bercy, and had died a year
later, happy that she should at last leave behind a healthy, beautiful
child, to do her honour in her lord's eyes.

In this same room the Duke and the brave second son had spent unnumbered
hours; and here it had come home to him that the young wife was
faultless as to the elder, else she had not borne him this perfect
younger son. Thus her memory came to be adored; and thus, when the
noble second son, the glory of his house and of his heart, was killed
in Macedonia, the Duke still came to the little upper room for his
communion of remembrance. Hour after hour he would sit looking from
the great window out over the wide green valley, mourning bitterly, and
feeling his heart shrivel up within him, his body grow crabbed and cold,
and his face sour and scornful.

When Philip now entered this sanctuary, the Duke nodded and motioned him
to a chair. In silence he accepted, and in silence they sat for a time.
Philip knew the history of this little room--he had learned it first
from Frange Pergot, the porter at the castle gates with whom he had made
friends. The silence gave him opportunity to recall the whole story.

At length the motionless brown figure huddled in the great chair, not
looking at Philip but out over the wide green valley, began to speak in
a low, measured tone, as a dreamer might tell his dream, or a priest his
vision:

"A breath of life has come again to me through you. Centuries ago our
ancestors were brothers--far back in the direct line, brothers--the
monks have proved it.

"Now I shall have my spite of the Vaufoutaines, and now shall I have
another son--strong, and with good blood in him to beget good blood."

A strange, lean sort of smile passed over his lips, his eyebrows
twitched, his hands clinched the arm of the chair wherein he sat, and he
made a motion of his jaws as though enjoying a toothsome morsel.

"H'm, Henri Vaufontaine shall see--and all his tribe! They shall not
feed upon these lands of the d'Avranches, they shall not carouse at my
table when I am gone and the fool I begot has returned to his Maker. The
fault of him was never mine, but God's--does t