“He gives you no food?” said Rodriguez.

“It is the way of many men with their dog,” said Morano.  “They give him no food,” and then he rubbed his hands cheerfully, “and yet the dog does not die.”

“And he gives you no wages?” said Rodriguez.

“Just these rings.”

Now Rodriguez had himself a ring upon his finger (as a gallant should), a slender piece of gold with four tiny angels holding a sapphire, and for a moment he pictured the sapphire passing into the hands of mine host and the ring of gold and the four small angels being flung to Morano; the thought darkened his gaiety for no longer than one of those fleecy clouds in Spring shadows the fields of Spain.

Morano was also looking at the ring; he had followed the young man’s glance.

“Master,” he said, “do you draw your sword of a night?”

“And you?” said Rodriguez.

“I have no sword,” said Morano.  “I am but as dog’s meat that needs no guarding, but you whose meat is rare like the flesh of the unicorn need a sword to guard your meat.  The unicorn has his horn always, and even then he sometimes sleeps.”

“It is bad, you think, to sleep,” Rodriguez said.

“For some it is very bad, master.  They say they never take the unicorn waking.  For me I am but dog’s meat:  when I have eaten hams I curl up and sleep; but then you see, master, I know I shall wake in the morning.”

“Ah,” said Rodriguez, “the morning’s a pleasant time,” and he leaned back comfortably in his chair.  Morano took one shrewd look at him, and was soon asleep upon his three-legged stool.

The door opened after a while and mine host appeared.  “It is late,” he said.  Rodriguez smiled acquiescently and mine host withdrew, and presently leaving Morano whom his master’s voice had waked, to curl up on the floor in a corner, Rodriguez took the candle that lit the room and passed once more through the passages of the inn and down the great corridor of the fastness of the family that had fallen on evil days, and so came to his chamber.  I will not waste a multitude of words over that chamber; if you have no picture of it in your mind already, my reader, you are reading an unskilled writer, and if in that picture it appear a wholesome room, tidy and well kept up, if it appear a place in which a stranger might sleep without some faint foreboding of disaster, then I am wasting your time, and will waste no more of it with bits of “descriptive writing” about that dim, high room, whose blackness towered before Rodriguez in the night.  He entered and shut the door, as many had done before him; but for all his youth he took some wiser precautions than had they, perhaps, who closed that door before.  For first he drew his sword; then for some while he stood quite still near the door and listened to the rats; then he looked round the chamber and perceived only one door; then he looked at the heavy oak furniture, carved by some artist, gnawed by rats, and all blackened