"I have forgotten nothing. You are an Englishman. Your name is--peste!--I--I know it, yet for the moment it has escaped me. Nevertheless, I shall recall it."
"It would be best that you should not endeavour to recall it," Bevill said, looking down on the man--and there was light enough for Francbois to see that the glance was a stern, determined one. "Also that you do not intrude on my affairs. If you do so, it will be dangerous for you."
"Dangerous for me!" the other exclaimed, with a contemptuous laugh. "For me! On my life, monsieur, it is not I who stand in danger here. Liége is dominated by the French, and I am a Frenchman. You are an Englishman. Your life is not worth a fico if that is once known."
"Short of you and what you may do, it cannot be known. Now listen to me. I am here in the garb of a private man, desiring not to draw my sword either in the disputes between your country and mine, or in personal quarrel. But that sword lies against my side ever ready to leap from its scabbard--as it will if I am thwarted in what I have set myself to do; if I am betrayed or falsely denounced by anyone--by you, since there is no other here who can do so. Ponder therefore on whether it will profit you to thwart, to betray me."
"Ohé!" Francbois exclaimed in a light and airy tone, which was probably but a poor outward sign of what his inward feelings were. "If it comes to drawing swords--ay, and crossing them too--there are others who can do as much. We Frenchmen know something of the swordsman's art. Witness how you English cross the Channel to take lessons in it from us."
"That is true. I myself took those lessons, and I have profited by them."
"Ah I it may be so," Francbois said, though the recollection of this fact, which for the moment he had forgotten, did not add much to his equanimity. "But as for the betrayal! Once betrayed, a man has little chance of avenging himself on his betrayer. The rat in the cage cannot bite his captor."
"He can bite him before he is caged. Now listen to me, Francbois. If I supposed to-night that you came into that house with a view to betraying me, you would never return to it. I know, however, why you followed me to it, why you were resolved to discover if I was within it. I know that you pester Mademoiselle Thorne with your addresses----"
"And I know," Francbois exclaimed, stung beyond endurance at the contemptuous tones of the other, "that you are an English lover of hers; that you have come here to be by her side, to endeavour, if it may be so, to remove her from Liége to your own land."
"It is false. I am no lover of hers. Except when she was a child of ten I have never set eyes on her until I did so here a week ago."