"Vile clown! That is for your having dared to raise your eyes to Mademoiselle Plouernel--while you wait to be hanged from the gibbet!" Such was the violence of the blow that although it was given with the flat of the sword blood spurted out of Nominoë's cheek and forehead. He emitted a terrible cry, and clenched his fists, but noticing a traveling cutlass hanging at Serdan's side he seized it and precipitated himself upon the Count of Plouernel. "Count!" shouted the Marquis of Chateauvieux, also drawing his sword, "let us kill the vassal like a dog!" Salaun ran to the help of his son, who was attacked by two adversaries at once; jumped at the neck of the Marquis of Chateauvieux; threw him to the ground; and, despite all the resistance that he offered, disarmed him; while Nominoë, after dexterously parrying a blow aimed at him by the Count of Plouernel, struck back so heavily with the reverse of the cutlass upon the Count's wrist that his hand was paralyzed and dropped the sword. All this happened with the swiftness of thought. Despite the Count's conduct towards her, Mademoiselle Plouernel emitted a cry of terror at the sight of her brother engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with Nominoë. At the risk of being struck by both in the heat of the combat, she rushed forward to separate them. Trembling at the danger that the young girl ran, Serdan threw his arms around her and held her back. The girl uttered a piercing cry, staggered, became ashen pale; her head fell backward, she fainted away overcome with terror, and would have dropped to the ground but for Serdan holding her up and seating her gently upon the grass with her back supported by the old oak tree. Mademoiselle Plouernel had lost all consciousness. In the midst of the tumult, the forester guardsmen whom one of the Count's equerries had gone in search of as ordered by his master, stepped upon the scene, armed with their muskets and hunting knives. "To me, guardsmen! Arrest these assassins! Do not kill them, I shall bring them to justice!" cried the Count of Plouernel, whom the blow of Nominoë's cutlass had rendered helpless, and who held his bleeding and mutilated right hand in his left, while Nominoë himself, seeing Bertha lying unconscious at the foot of the old dead oak, flung away his cutlass, and thinking only of Mademoiselle Plouernel, threw himself upon his knees beside the young girl. At the call of their seigneur, the guardsmen, to the number of eight, rushed upon Salaun Lebrenn and Serdan. Disarmed by Nominoë, the latter could offer no effective resistance to the men who sought to seize him. Salaun, however, drawing his mariner's sword, returned thrust for thrust to the guardsmen who attacked him, and called out to his son, who was on his knees beside Bertha: "Up, Nominoë! Defend yourself! Let us defend ourselves!"