“’Twere better he were accompanied by a friend,” I quipped.  “And now your pardon, for I must go.”

But he blocked my path.

“Whoever it be,” he said, “let it be now.”

For the first time, with him, my anger began to rise.

“You serve your master well,” I sneered.

“I serve but my pleasure,” was his answer.  “Master I have none.”

“Pardon me if I presume to tell you the truth,” I said.

“Which is?” he queried softly.

“That you are a liar, Pasquini, a liar like all Italians.”

He turned immediately to Lanfranc and Bohemond.

“You heard,” he said.  “And after that you cannot deny me him.”

They hesitated and looked to me for counsel of my wishes.  But Pasquini did not wait.

“And if you still have any scruples,” he hurried on, “then allow me to remove them . . . thus.”

And he spat in the grass at my feet.  Then my anger seized me and was beyond me.  The red wrath I call it—­an overwhelming, all-mastering desire to kill and destroy.  I forgot that Philippa waited for me in the great hall.  All I knew was my wrongs—­the unpardonable interference in my affairs by the gray old man, the errand of the priest, the insolence of Fortini, the impudence of Villehardouin, and here Pasquini standing in my way and spitting in the grass.  I saw red.  I thought red.  I looked upon all these creatures as rank and noisome growths that must be hewn out of my path, out of the world.  As a netted lion may rage against the meshes, so raged I against these creatures.  They were all about me.  In truth, I was in the trap.  The one way out was to cut them down, to crush them into the earth and stamp upon them.

“Very well,” I said, calmly enough, although my passion was such that my frame shook.  “You first, Pasquini.  And you next, de Goncourt?  And at the end, de Villehardouin?”

Each nodded in turn and Pasquini and I prepared to step aside.

“Since you are in haste,” Henry Bohemond proposed to me, “and since there are three of them and three of us, why not settle it at the one time?”

“Yes, yes,” was Lanfranc’s eager cry.  “Do you take de Goncourt.  De Villehardouin for mine.”

But I waved my good friends back.

“They are here by command,” I explained.  “It is I they desire so strongly that by my faith I have caught the contagion of their desire, so that now I want them and will have them for myself.”

I had observed that Pasquini fretted at my delay of speech-making, and I resolved to fret him further.

“You, Pasquini,” I announced, “I shall settle with in short account.  I would not that you tarried while Fortini waits your companionship.  You, Raoul de Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in such bad company.  You are getting fat and wheezy.  I shall take my time with you until your fat melts and your lungs pant and wheeze like leaky bellows.  You, de Villehardouin, I have not decided in what manner I shall kill.”