conditioned Fool!"

I looked at him with pleasant, smiling eyes.

"You confirm the opinion that is popularly held of you," said I.

"What may that be?" quoth he, his eyes very evil. "In Rome, I'm told,
they call you hangman."

He growled in his throat like an angered cur, and his hands were jerked
to the level of his breast, the fingers bending talon-wise.

"Body of God!" he muttered fiercely, "I'll teach one fool, at least--"

"Let us cease these pleasantries, I entreat you," I laughed. "Saints
defend me! If your mood incline to raillery you'll find your match in
some lad of the stables. As for me, I have not the time, had I the will,
to engage you further. Let me remind you that I would be gone."

The reminder was well-timed. He bethought him of the journey I must go,
on which he was charged to see me safely started.

"Come on, then," he growled, in a white heat of passion that was only
curbed by the consideration of that slender, pale young cardinal, his
master.

Still, some of his rage he vented in roughly taking me by the collar of
my doublet, and dragging the almost headlong from the room, and so a-down
a flight of steps out into the courtyard. Meet treatment for a Fool--a
treatment to which time might have inured me; for had I not for three