of my haunts and
movements. How I had kept a barber's shop in Sabugal under his very
nose; what disguises I used (and you know that I never used a disguise
in my life); how my servant had assisted M. de Brissac in a duel and
afterwards escaped in his uniform--with much more, and all of it news
to me. My astonished face merely excited his laughter; he set it down
to my eccentricity. But after dinner, when M. de Brissac had taken his
departure, Marmont crossed his handsome legs and came to business.

"'Sir,' said he, 'I am going to pay you a compliment. We have suffered
heavily through your cleverness; and although Lord Wellington may
choose to call you a scouting officer, you must be aware (and will
forgive me for reminding you) that I might well be excused for calling
you by an uglier name.'

"You may be sure I did not like this. You may also remember how at
Huerta on the occasion of our first meeting the question of _disguise_
came up between us, and how I assured you that to me, with my Scottish
face and accent, a disguise would be worse than useless. Well, that
was true enough so far as it went; but I fear that in my anxiety not
to offend your feelings I spoke less than the whole truth, for I have
always held that in our business as soon as a man resorts to disguise
his work ceases to be legitimate scouting. It may be no less
justifiable and even more useful, but it is no longer scouting. I
admit the distinction to be a nice one;[A] and I have sometimes asked
myself, when covering my uniform with my dark riding cloak, 'What,
after all, is a disguise?' Nevertheless, I had always observed it,
and standing before Marmont now in His Majesty's scarlet, which (as I
might have told him) I had never discarded either to further a plan
or to avoid a danger, I put some constraint on myself to listen in
silence on the merest off-chance that my silence might help an affair
with which the marshal assumed my perfect acquaintance, while I could
only surmise that somehow you were mixed up in it, and therefore
presumably it aimed at some advantage to our arms. I did keep silence,
however, though without so much as a bow to signify that I assented.

[Footnote A: NOTE BY MANUEL MCNEILL.--I should think so indeed! To me
the moral difference, say, between hiding in a truss of hay and hiding
under a wig is not worth discussing outside a seminary.]

"'But you are a gentleman,' Marmont continued, 'and I propose to treat
you as one. You