His heart was on fire:  all his old passion for the Rose had flashed up again at the sight of her with a lover;—­and that lover a Spaniard!  He would cut his throat for him, if steel could do it!  Only he recollected that Salterne was there, and shrank from exposing Rose; and shrank, too, as every gentleman should, from making a public quarrel in another man’s house.  Never mind.  Where there was a will there was a way.  He could get him into a corner, and quarrel with him privately about the cut of his beard, or the color of his ribbon.  So in he went; and, luckily or unluckily, found standing together apart from the rest, Sir Richard, the Don, and young St. Leger.

“Well, Don Guzman, you have given us wine-bibbers the slip this afternoon.  I hope you have been well employed in the meanwhile?”

“Delightfully to myself, senor,” said the Don, who, enraged at being interrupted, if not discovered, was as ready to fight as Cary, but disliked, of course, an explosion as much as he did; “and to others, I doubt not.”

“So the ladies say,” quoth St. Leger.  “He has been making them all cry with one of his stories, and robbing us meanwhile of the pleasure we had hoped for from some of his Spanish songs.”

“The devil take Spanish songs!” said Cary, in a low voice, but loud enough for the Spaniard.  Don Guzman clapt his hand on his sword-hilt instantly.

“Lieutenant Cary,” said Sir Richard, in a stern voice, “the wine has surely made you forget yourself!”

“As sober as yourself, most worshipful knight; but if you want a Spanish song, here’s one; and a very scurvy one it is, like its subject—­

       “Don Desperado
        Walked on the Prado,
     And there he met his enemy. 
        He pulled out a knife, a,
        And let out his life, a,
     And fled for his own across the sea.”

And he bowed low to the Spaniard.

The insult was too gross to require any spluttering.

“Senor Cary, we meet?”

“I thank your quick apprehension, Don Guzman Maria Magdalena Sotomayor de Soto.  When, where, and with what weapons?”

“For God’s sake, gentlemen!  Nephew Arthur, Cary is your guest; do you know the meaning of this?”

St. Leger was silent.  Cary answered for him.

“An old Irish quarrel, I assure you, sir.  A matter of years’ standing.  In unlacing the senor’s helmet, the evening that he was taken prisoner, I was unlucky enough to twitch his mustachios.  You recollect the fact, of course, senor?”

“Perfectly,” said the Spaniard; and then, half-amused and half-pleased, in spite of his bitter wrath, at Cary’s quickness and delicacy in shielding Rose, he bowed, and—­

“And it gives me much pleasure to find that he whom I trust to have the pleasure of killing tomorrow morning is a gentleman whose nice sense of honor renders him thoroughly worthy of the sword of a De Soto.”