“He means to tell his wife,” he said with a foolish gurgle of laughter.  “He must be an ass.  I don’t think if I had a wife I should tell her.  Would you, Wogan, tell your wife if you had one?  Misset wouldn’t tell his wife.”

Misset interrupted him.

“What have you drank since I went out of the room?” he asked roughly.  He took up the water-jug and turned it topsy-turvy.  It was quite empty.

“Only water,” said O’Toole, dreamily, and he laughed again.  “Now I wouldn’t mind telling my wife that,” said he.

Misset let him go and turned with a gesture of despair to Wogan.

“I poured my flask out into the water-bottle.  It was full of burnt Strasbourg brandy, of double strength.  It is as potent as opium.  Neither of them will have his wits before to-morrow.  It will not help us to leave O’Toole to guard the courier.”

“And we cannot take him,” said Wogan.  “There is the Princess to be thought of.  We must leave him, and we cannot leave him alone, for his neck’s in danger,—­more than in danger if the courier wakes before him.”

He picked up carefully the scraps of the letter and placed them in the middle of the fire.  They were hardly burnt before Gaydon came into the room with word that horses were already being harnessed to the berlin.  Wogan explained their predicament.

“We must choose which of us three shall stay behind,” said he.

“Which of us two,” Misset corrected, pointing to Gaydon and himself.  “When the Princess drives into Bologna, Charles Wogan, who first had the high heart to dare this exploit, the brain to plot, the hand to execute it,—­Charles Wogan must ride at her side, not Misset, not Gaydon.  I take no man’s honours.”  He shook Wogan by the hand as he spoke, and he had spoken with an extraordinary warmth of admiration.  Gaydon could do no less than follow his companion’s example, though there was a shade of embarrassment in his manner of assenting.  It was not that he had any envy of Wogan, or any desire to rob him of a single tittle of his due credit.  There was nothing mean in Gaydon’s nature, but here was a halving of Clementina’s protectors, and he could not stifle a suspicion that the best man of the four to leave behind was really Charles Wogan himself.  Not a word, however, of this could he say, and so he nodded his assent to Misset’s proposal.

“It is I, then, who stay behind with O’Toole and the courier,” he said.  “Misset has a wife; the lot evidently falls to me.  We will make a shift somehow or another to keep the fellow quiet till sundown to-morrow, which time should see you out of danger.”  He unbuckled the sword from his waist and laid it on the table, and that simple action somehow touched Wogan to the heart.  He slipped his arm into Gaydon’s and said remorsefully,—­