“But you said...” began MacIan.

“I know,” said Turnbull scornfully.  “And what did you say?  You damned fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and shadowed by the coppers for half a decade.  If you wanted to fight, why did you tell that ass you wanted to?  I got you out, to fight if you want to.  Now, fight if you dare.”

“I swear to you, then,” said MacIan, after a pause.  “I swear to you that nothing shall come between us.  I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together.  I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart.  I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God.”

The atheist drew up his head.  “And I,” he said, “give my word.”

III.  SOME OLD CURIOSITIES

The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mellow light.  It made a little greasy street of St. Martin’s Lane look as if it were paved with gold.  It made the pawnbroker’s half-way down it shine as if it were really that Mountain of Piety that the French poetic instinct has named it; it made the mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian colour.  And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the shop of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in itself.  The front window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to be jewels; for it was in brief, a shop of bric-a-brac and old curiosities.  A row of half-burnished seventeenth-century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of the window; behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture.  But the romance of the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop, had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front door that opened on the street and a back door that opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square of gold.  There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place.