"The Abbot's questions? Does your Excellency mean to answer them?"
"Questions!" cried the Viscount in a fury; "the Abbot's questions! The Abbot's insults, you mean."
Weighing his words and maintaining his politeness with an effort the captain said:
"My orders are to go to almost any extremity rather than use force against these monks. And on the whole we have succeeded better than I hoped. If we permit the Abbot to save his face, he will evacuate the position to-morrow, and will fight only in Lisbon to regain it. At the same time I quite understand that your Excellency can hardly answer questions which sound like insults. But he can leave it all to me. It can do no harm to sign their inventory; and, with due permission, I assure the Abbot that the noble Visconde de Ponte Quebrada has not the faintest idea of dealing with the monastery for his own ends. At noon they will go."
The Viscount looked searchingly at the captain across the crumbs and rinds. The captain looked no less searchingly at the Viscount. Each saw a certain distance into the other's mind.
"Captain," said the Viscount at last, "as that ghastly old corpse of an Abbot was impudent enough to observe, I am not a born Portuguese. Give me leave to drop this flummery of 'Excellency,' and all the rest of it, so that we can talk openly for five minutes. About this inventory. Some of the things are valuable. The whole lot might be worth nearly a thousand pounds."
"I should have thought nearly eleven hundred," said the captain.
The Viscount pricked up his ears: but detecting nothing ironical or suspicious in the captain's voice or expression, he continued:
"Say a round thousand. Out of that the Government must have four hundred. What do you say to—"
He paused, studying the captain's face narrowly. Then he jerked out: