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As soon as he had landed and donned his clothes, the Prince came forward and asked him to cross swords with him to prove his skill, saying: "Let us two prove which is the better swordsman of the two!" The robber agreed with delight, feeling certain of victory, for he was famous as a fencer in his province and he did not know who his adversary was.
"Now what might that represent?" he asked curiously. "A line, Mr. Hillard. The moment you cross that line, that moment you leave this house. On guard!" "Come, that is not brave. You can retreat till your shoulders touch the mat, but I must stand this side of the line, unable to reach you. And you have the advantage of the mask besides. You are not a fair fencer." "The odds should be in my favor.
Fortunately for us, women are strangers to the last. They have had to throw off a mask before they have, got the schooling; so, when they are thus armed we know what we meet, and what are the weapons to be used. Alice, if she is a fine fencer at all, will expect to meet the ordinary English squire in me. I have seen her at the baptismal font! It is inconceivable.
The Duke de Morlay was standing behind the Marquis, who was still at the whist table. Albert Styvens had sat down beside a diplomat from Italy, Cesar Gabrielli, a serious young man, a clever diplomat, and a renowned fencer. When Montagnac finished his hand, the Duke offered him a cigar. "Will you help me with some arrangements for the performance to-morrow?"
With all its funds, and improved school-houses, and able teachers, and grammars, and maps, and black-boards, such an education is essentially defective. Without moral principle at bottom to guide and control its energies, education is a sharp sword in the hands of a practiced and reckless fencer.
"Too old to work," some called him, wondering why David Linton kept the old fencer, when younger men were always wanting work on Billabong; and now, as he faced the long room with his faded blue eyes a little misty, Andy looked an old man indeed.
On this occasion I owed my broken arm to the fact that my horse, a solemn animal originally taken out of a buggy, though a very clever fencer, was too coarse to gallop alongside the blooded beasts against which he was pitted. But he was so easy in his gaits, and so quiet, being ridden with only a snaffle, that there was no difficulty in following to the end of the run.
Harz dodged before the canvas like a fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a packingcase. "The snows have gone with a rush this year," he drawled. "The Talfer comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the Etsch and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my painter." Harz mixed his colours. "I've no time for parables," he said, "no time for anything.
At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man in a bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if he were to escape defeat. "I said from the first," he told him one day, "that Nature designed you for a swordsman.
For half a minute or so the faces of the onlookers reflected only a mild surprise, mingled with curiosity. But the fencers had done little more than feel one another's blades, they had certainly not exchanged more than half a dozen serious passes, before this was changed, before one face grew longer and another more intent. A man who was no fencer, and therefore no judge, spoke.
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