that the part he had chosen was, after all, the best.  Besides, Wogan had between his knees the most friendly and intelligent beast which he had ridden since that morning when he met Lady Featherstone on the road to Bologna.  But he had soon other matters to distract his thoughts.  However easily Flavia cantered or trotted she could not but sharply remind him of his wounds.  He had forty miles to travel before he could reach Schlestadt; and in the villages on the road there was gossip that day of a man with a tormented face who rode rocking in his saddle as though the furies were at his back.

CHAPTER VIII

The little town of Schlestadt went to bed betimes.  By ten o’clock its burghers were in their night-caps.  A belated visitor going home at that hour found his footsteps ring upon the pavement with surprising echoes, and traversed dark street after dark street, seeing in each window, perhaps, a mimic moon, but no other light unless his path chanced to lie through Herzogstrasse.  In that street a couple of windows on the first floor showed bright and unabashed, and the curious passer-by could detect upon the blind the shadows of men growing to monstrous giants and dwindling to pigmies according as they approached or retired from the lamp in the room.

There were three men in that room booted as for a journey.  Their dress might have misled one into the belief that they were merchants, but their manner of wearing it proclaimed them soldiers.  Of the three, one, a short, spare man, sat at the table with his head bent over a slip of paper.  His peruke was pushed back from his forehead and showed that the hair about his temples was grey.  He had a square face of some strength, and thoughtful eyes.

The second of the three stood by the window.  He was, perhaps, a few years younger, thirty-six an observer might have guessed to the other’s forty, and his face revealed a character quite different.  His features were sharp, his eyes quick; if prudence was the predominating quality of the first, resource took its place in the second.  While the first man sat patiently at the table, this one stood impatiently at the window.  Now he lifted the blind, now he dropped it again.

The third sat in front of the fire with his face upturned to the ceiling.  He was a tall, big man with mighty legs which sprawled one on each side of the hearth.  He was the youngest of the three by five years, but his forehead at this moment was so creased, his mouth so pursed up, his cheeks so wrinkled, he had the look of sixty years.  He puffed and breathed very heavily; once or twice he sighed, and at each sigh his chair creaked under him.  Major O’Toole of Dillon’s regiment was thinking.

“Gaydon,” said he, suddenly.

The man at the table looked up quickly.

“Misset.”

The man at the window turned impatiently.

“I have an idea.”