e gift of life or death in Venice?"

His subordinate answered--

"This friar, Captain, is one whom Venice, surely, will make the
greatest of her nobles to-day."

COWARDICE COURT

BY GEO.B. McCUTCHEON

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH A YOUNG MAN TRESPASSES

"He's just an infernal dude, your lordship, and I'll throw him in the
river if he says a word too much."

"He has already said too much, Tompkins, confound him, don't you
know."

"Then I'm to throw him in whether he says anything or not, sir?"

"Have you seen him?"

"No, your lordship, but James has. James says he wears a red coat
and--"

"Never mind, Tompkins. He had no right to fish on this side of that
log. The insufferable ass may own the land on the opposite side, but
confound his impertinence, I own it on this side."

This concluding assertion of the usually placid but now irate Lord
Bazelhurst was not quite as momentous as it sounded. As a matter of
fact, the title to the land was vested entirely in his young American
wife; his sole possession, according to report, being a title much
less substantial but a great deal more picturesque than the large,
much-handled piece of paper down in the safety deposit vault--lying
close and crumpled among a million sordid, homely little slips called
coupons.

It requires no great stretch of imagination to understand that Lord
Bazelhurst had an undesirable neighbor. That neighbor was young Mr.
Shaw--Randolph Shaw, heir to the Randolph fortune. It may be fair to
state that Mr. Shaw also considered himself to be possessed of an
odious neighbor. In other words, although neither had seen the other,
there was a feud between the owners of the two estates that had all
the earmarks of an ancient romance.

Lady Bazelhurst was the daughter of a New York millionaire; she was
young, beautiful, and arrogant. Nature gave her youth and beauty;
marriage gave her the remaining quality. Was she not Lady Bazelhurst?
What odds if Lord Bazelhurst happened to be a middle-aged, addle-pated
ass? So much the better. Bazelhurst castle and the Bazelhurst estates
(heavily encumbered before her father came to the rescue) were among
the oldest and most coveted in the English market. Her mother noted,
with unctuous joy, that the present Lady Bazelhurst in babyhood had
extreme difficulty in mastering the eighth letter of the alphabet,
certainly a most flattering sign of natal superiority, notwithstanding
the fact that her father was p