throat, and forced me backward against the cellar wall.

"'You spying sneak!' he cried. 'In spite of my warning you have been
hounding my footsteps!'

"The moment I attempted to reply, he throttled me so as to choke every
effort at utterance. There now approached us, with alarm in his
wine-colored face, a gross, corpulent man, whom the Prince addressed as
proprietor of the place, which doubtless he was.

"'Landlord,' said Roland very quietly, 'this unfortunate monk is weak in
the head, and although he means no harm with his meddling, he may well
cause disaster to my comrades and myself. Earlier in the evening he
accosted on the bridge, but I spared him, hoping never to see his
monkish costume again. You may judge the state of his mind when I tell
you he accuses me of being the Emperor's son, and Heaven only knows what
he would estimate to be the quality of my comrades were he to see them.'

"Two or three times I attempted to speak, but the closing of his fingers
upon my throat prevented me, and even when they were slightly relaxed I
was scarcely able to breathe."

The Countess listened with the closest attention, fixing upon the
narrator her splendid eyes, and in them, despite their feminine beauty
and softness, seemed to smoulder a deep fire of resentment at the
treatment accorded her kinsman, a luminant of danger transmitted to her
down the ages from ancestors equally ready to fight for the Sepulcher in
Palestine or for the gold on the borders of the Rhine. In the pause,
during which the monk wiped from his wrinkled brow the moisture brought
there by remembrance of the indignity he had undergone, kindliness in