Roger appeared to the kindly soldiers, who had made a rude couch for him and were tending him with such skill as they possessed, to be talking in the random of delirium, and they paid little heed to his words.  But as Gaston stood by he was struck by the strange fixity of the youth’s eyes, by the rigidity of his muscles, and by the coherence and significance of his words.

It was not a disconnected babble that passed his lips; it was the description of some scene upon which he appeared to be looking.  He spoke of horsemen galloping through the night, of the Black Visor in the midst and his gigantic companion by his side.  He spoke of the unconscious captive they carried in their midst —­ the captive the youth struggled frantically to join, that they might share together whatever fate was to be his.

The soldiers naturally believed he was wandering, and speaking of his own ride with his captors; but Gaston listened with different feelings.  He remembered well what he had once heard about this boy and the strange gift he possessed, or was said to possess, of seeing what went on at a distance when he had been in the power of the sorcerer.  Might it not be that this gift was not only exercised at the will of another, but might be brought into play by the tension of anxiety evoked by a great strain upon the boy’s own nervous system?  Gaston did not phrase the question thus, but he well knew the devotion with which Roger regarded Raymond, and it seemed quite possible to him that in this crisis of his life, his body weakened by wounds and fatigue, his mind strained by grief and anxiety as to the fate of him he loved more than life, his spirit had suddenly taken that ascendency over his body which of old it had possessed, and that he was really and truly following in that strange trance-like condition every movement of the party of which Raymond was the centre.

At any rate, whether he were right or not in this surmise, Gaston resolved that he would not lose a word of these almost ceaseless utterings, and dismissing his men to get what rest they could, he sat beside Roger, and listened with attention to every word he spoke.

Roger lay with his eyes wide open in the same fixed and glassy stare.  He spoke of a halt made at a wayside inn, of the rousing up with the earliest stroke of dawn of the keeper of this place, of the inside of the bare room, and the hasty refreshment set before the impatient travellers.

“He sits down, they both sit down, and then he laughs —­ ah, where have I heard that laugh before?” and a look of strange terror sweeps over the youth’s face. “’I may now remove my visor —­ my vow is fulfilled!  My enemy is in my hands.  My Lord of Navailles, I drink this cup to your good health and the success of our enterprise.  We have the victim in our own hands.  We can wring from him every concession we desire before we offer him for ransom.’”