for slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he
saved the man's name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you
insist on telling the world why he was slain."

"I know your voice--I know it. Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.
And if--"

But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on. Monnier looked
round, saw him gone, but did not pursue. He was just intoxicated enough
to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the
wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine. Could you have seen him then
as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known
the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.
You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on a
great royalty fallen. For the grandest of all royalties is that which
takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth. And Nature
made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn of
meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of heart
which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and home,
to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal natures
would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.

How had the royalty of the man's nature fallen thus? Royalty rarely
falls from its own constitutional faults. It falls when, ceasing to be
royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers. And what bad advisers,
always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser, had
discrowned this mechanic?

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says the old-fashioned poet.