The garden, tree-shaded and high-walled on all sides, seemed to shut in and concentrate the night’s gloom. The sound of two swords, hissing out of the scabbards even as the words were spoken, was sinister in the darkness. Rockhurst quickly drew once more within the faint circle of light. The lantern held aloft (now in a somewhat nervous clutch, it must be said) revealed the silent laughter that rippled over his features like wild-fire, as he flung himself into an extravagantly truculent fencing attitude. The Spaniard, stamping on the sod like a bull enraged, filled the air with guttural execrations, while he swung Rockhurst’s cloak in frantic circles over his left arm. His rapier gleamed one moment aloft, then, low-aimed, shot forward like a flash. Marcelin involuntarily shouted warning; but Rockhurst, with the coolness of the experienced fighting man, had already slipped from the stroke of death as airily as the practised dancer to the turn of the tune. On the instant he had plucked his dilapidated beaver from his head, and beating with it the menacing blade widely aside, brought down his own steel whistling upon the wrist that palely showed behind the gilt Toledo hilt. With a muffled scream of rage and pain the Spaniard dropped his weapon, fell on one knee, feverishly shaking the cloak off his arm to nurse his helpless, bleeding hand. Rockhurst’s skill, guided by luck, had inflicted, at the first pass, one of those disabling wounds that cause pangs singularly disproportionate to their seriousness. He sheathed his rapier with much deliberation, picked up his cloak and flung it around him as it were a royal mantle, smoothed out the feather in his hat,—not improved in any way by its buckler service,—and set it back on his head at the right jaunty cock. He was about to pass the Capitan with a taunting _buenas noches_, when some impulse of careless good nature bade him change his mind. “Nay, I am sure,” he said, “that our fair one within will support my invitation when I bid you to sup and converse. In your own Castilian phrase: Will you not enter into this your house?—Marcelin, support the Señor Capitan; he waxes, methinks, somewhat weakly.” And, upon a further spur of magnanimity, he himself returned the fallen sword to the defeated man’s side. Faint chinks of light cut upon the darkness showed them where the house door stood, slightly ajar, upon the garden. And as the trio approached, the feet of the wounded man shuffling along the tiled path, the soft voice called out, in its broken Spanish:— “Señor Ramon, is that you?—For the love of God, what has happened?” He who was just adjured answered only by a groan; whereupon Rockhurst, stepping up to the chink and speaking in low but cheerful tones, addressed the invisible lady in French this time:—