CHAPTER XII.
THE MAN FROM THE EAST In a great, cool room of his splendid Venetian palace, Sir Edmund Acour, Seigneur of Cattrina sat in consultation with the priest Nicholas.
Clearly he was ill at ease; his face and his quick, impatient movements showed it.
"You arrange badly," he said in a voice quite devoid of its ordinary melodious tones.

"Everything goes wrong.

How is it you did not know that this accursed Englishman and his Death's-head were coming here?
What is the use of a spy who never spies?
Man, they should have been met upon the road, for who can be held answerable for what brigands do?
Or, at the least, I might have started for Avignon two days earlier." "Am I omnipotent, lord, that I should be held able to read the minds of men in far countries and to follow their footsteps ?" asked the aggrieved Nicholas.

"Still it might have been guessed that this bulldog of a Briton would hang to your heels till you kick out his brains or he pulls you down.

Bah! the sight of that archer, who cannot miss, always gives me a cold pain in the stomach, as though an arrow-point were working through my vitals.