Holles tore his wrist free at the same moment by a last wrench. But it was too late. Casting the Duke’s sword hand from him, he sprang away and round with a tearing sob to face the lackeys. For a second his glittering point held them at bay. Then the blow of a club shivered the blade, and they rushed in upon him. He felled one of them with a blow of the hilt which he still retained, before a club took him across the skull. Under that blow he reeled back against the table, his limbs sagged, and he sank down in a heap, unconscious. As he lay there one of the grooms, standing over him, swung his club again with the clear intention of beating out his brains. But the Duke arrested the descending blow. “It is not necessary,” he said. He was white and breathing hard from his exertions and there was a fevered glitter in his eyes. But these signs apart he was master of himself. “Your arm, monseigneur!” cried François, pointing to the blood that filled his sleeve. “Bah! A scratch! Presently.” Then he pointed to the prone limp figure of Holles, from whose head the blood was slowly trickling. “Get a rope, François, and truss him up.” François departed on his errand. “You others, carry Antoine out. Then return for Bobadil. I may have a use for him yet.” They moved to obey him, and picked up their fellow whom Holles had felled before he, himself, went down. The Duke was not pleased with them at all. A little more and they might have been too late. But to reproach them with it entailed an admission which this proud, vain man was reluctant to make. They trooped out obediently, and Buckingham, still very pale, but breathing now more composedly, turned to Nancy with a queer little smile on lips that looked less red than usual. CHAPTER XX THE CONQUEROR She had reached that point of endurance at which sensibility becomes mercifully dulled. She sat there, her head resting against the tall back of the chair, her eyes closed, a sense of physical nausea pervading her. Yet, at the sound of the Duke’s voice gently addressing her, she opened her long blue eyes, set now in deep stains of suffering, and looked at this handsome satyr who stood before her in an attitude of deference that was in itself a mockery. “Dear Sylvia,” he was saying, “I am beyond measure pained that you should have been subjected to this ... this unseemly spectacle; I need not protest that it was no part of my intention.” She answered him almost mechanically, yet the ironical answer she delivered was true to her proud nature and the histrionic art which would not be denied expression even in the extremity to which she was reduced. “That, sir, I can well believe.” He considered her, wondering a little at that flash of spirit, from one in her condition. If anything it but served to increase his admiration. He sighed.