with old pistols purloined
from the historic gun-room of the old Hall! It had been a leaf from the
book of Claude Duval with a slight difference.

Nick had re-acted the scene for him. He was an inimitable mimic. He had
taken off old Lady Fanshawe's cackling fright to the life. As the
stoutest and oldest dowager of the lot he had obliged her to dance a
minuet with him, the terrified coachman, postilion, and solitary male
passenger covered by his companions' pistols the while. The fluttered
younger occupants of the coach had frankly envied the terrified dowager,
yet Nick had bestowed but the most perfunctory of glances upon them, and
that for a reason best known to himself.

Later the truth of the affair had leaked out, and Lady Fanshawe could
never chaperon one of her numerous nieces to a ball, without being
besieged by young men imploring the favour of a dance. Being a sporting
old lady--when not out of her wits with terror--she had taken it all in
good part. Once, even, she had danced the very same minuet with Nick, the
whole ballroom looking on and applauding.

It had been the first of a series of pranks each madder than the last,
but each equally light-hearted and gay.

That is till Cecilia Lester married Basil Percy.

The world, namely the small circle in which Cecilia and Nick moved, had
heard of the marriage with amazement. If Nick was amazed he did not show
it, but his pranks held less of gaiety, more of a grim foolhardiness.
Father O'Brady no longer chuckled over their recitation. Maybe because
they mainly reached his ears from outside sources. Nick, who was not of
his fold, seldom sought his society in these days. Later he heard them
not at all, being removed to another mission.

And then, at last, came the day when Nick played his final prank in the
hunting field,--his maddest prank, in which Baccarat failed him. The
horse was shot where he lay. His rider was carried home half dead; and
half dead, literally, he had been for fifteen years.

And there was yet one more year left to him.

* * * * *

Nicholas sat gazing at the fire.

His brain was extraordinarily alert. There was a dawning humour waking in
his eyes, a hint of the bygone years' devil-may-careness. The old Nick
was stirring within him, roused by the little blows of that sentence.

Suddenly a flash of laughter illuminated his whole face. He brought his
hand down on the arm of his chair.

"By gad,