ch other
without acquaintance or recognition?"

"Probably--at least we may salute when we meet."

"Then I say the guillotine has done more for civilization than the
schoolmaster," cried the other. "And all this because you are a Papist?"

"Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone
inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it--there's the
secret of it all."

"I 'd rebel. I 'd descend into the streets!"

"And you'd get hanged for your pains."

A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on:--

"Some one once said, 'It was better economy in a state to teach people
not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;' and so I would say to
our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for
than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us."

"What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?" cried the
foreigner, passionately.

"Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say
it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat
of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it
to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as
certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands
there."

"Here's to _la bonne chance_," said the other, filling a bumper and
drinking it off.

"You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I
suspect will cost you some trouble," said Longworth. "The very name you
will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh
will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an
admission that you have no claim to the other appellation."

"It was my mother's name. She was of a Provencal family, and the
Pracontals were people of good blood."

"But your father was always called Bramleigh?"

"My father, _mon cher_, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange
under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when
sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the
Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the
captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness' sake, 'Brutto,' for
he was not personally attractive."

"Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?"

"Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on
the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh."

"To