'Let me not depart from my vows of humility in the heat of my own defence. I will say nothing. Do you, sir, make search upon me for the gear which this man says I have stolen, though all his evidence is that it chanced to be in a room in which for a little while I rested.'
'To accuse a priest!' said some one in a tone of indignation, and a murmur arose at once in sympathy.
It moved the young officer to mirth. He half swung on his heel so as to confront those mutterers.
'A priest!' he jeered. Then, his keen eyes flashed once more upon the friar. 'When did you last say Mass?'
Before that simple question Fra Sulpizio seemed to lose some of his assurance. Without even giving him time to answer, the officer fired another question. 'What is your name?'
'My name?' The friar was looking at him from eyes that seemed to have grown beadier than ever in that white, pitted face. 'I'll not expose myself to ribald unbelief. You shall have written proof of my name. Behold.' And from his gown he fetched a parchment, which he thrust under the soldier's nose.
The officer conned it a moment, then his eyes went over the edge of it back to the face of the man that held it.
'How can I read it upside down?'
The friar's hands, which shook a little, made haste to turn the sheet. As he did so Bellarion perceived two things; that the sheet had been correctly held at first; and that it was his own lost letter. He had a glimpse of the Abbot's seal as the parchment was turned.
He was momentarily bewildered by a discovery that was really threefold: first, the friar was indeed the thief who had rifled his scrip; second, he must be in a more desperate case than Bellarion suspected, to seek to cloak himself under a false identity; and, third, the pretence that the document proffered upside down was a test to discover whether the fellow could read, a trap into which the knave had tumbled headlong.