emoved the lid, and a savory gush of steam
filled the room. The man Pietro laughed.

"Our poached hare smells appetizing. Keep the choicest morsel for the
mother, Zara, and tell her I will be with her presently. There!
Achmet the Astrologer lies in a heap."

He had deftly taken off his flowing cloak, his long, silvery beard and
hair, and flung them together in a corner, and now he stood in the
center of the room, a stalwart young fellow of thirty or thereabouts,
with great Spanish eyes and profuse curling hair of an inky blackness.

"Let me but wash this white enamel off my face," he said, giving
himself a shake, "and Pietro is himself again. Sir Jasper would hardly
recognize Achmet, I fancy, if he saw him now."

He walked to a shelf on which was placed a wash-bowl and towel, and
plunged his face and head into the cold water. Five minutes' vigorous
splashing and rubbing, and he emerged, his pallid face brown as a
berry, his black hair in a snarl of crisp curls.

"And now to satisfy the inner man," he said, walking over to the pot,
seizing a wooden spoon, and drawing up a cricket. "My tramp of last
night and this morning has made me famously hungry, Zara."

"And the hare soup is good," said Zara. "While you breakfast, Pietro,
I will go to mother. Come up when you finish."

A steep stair-way that was like a ladder led to the loft. Zara
ascended this with agile fleetness, and the late astrologer was left
alone at his very unmagician-like work of scraping the pot with a
wooden spoon. Once or twice, as the fancy crossed him of the contrast
between Achmet, the Astrologer reading the stars, and Pietro the tramp
scraping the bones of the stolen hare, he laughed grimly to himself.

"And the world is made up of just such contrasts," he thought, "and
Pietro at his homely breakfast is more to be dreaded than Achmet
casting the horoscope. Ah! Sir Jasper Kingsland, it is a very fine
thing to be a baronet with fifteen thousand pounds a year, a noble
ancestral seat, a wife you love, and a son you adore. And yet Pietro,
the vagabond tramp--the sunburned gypsy, with stolen hares to eat, and
rags to wear, and a hut to lodge in--would not exchange places with you
this bright March day. We have sworn vendetta to you and all of your
blood, and we will keep our vow!"

His swarthy face darkened with passionate vindictiveness as he arose.

"'As a man sows so shall he reap,'" he muttered between his clinched
teeth, setti