His arm was as heavy, as numb, as lead, the conventional period had been ignored, and his torment went on and on. His chest, he thought, must burst under the strapped plastron, and sweat poured in a sheet across his eyes. The episode seemed utterly meaningless, undemanded; the more remarkable because of de Vaca's indifference to him, to all the trivialities of his Cuban duty. How yellow the face was, the eyes were like jet, through the mask. Then Charles Abbott grasped what, he was certain, was the purpose of such an apparently disproportionate attack. It was the result of a cold effort, a set determination, to destroy what courage he had. He gazed quickly about, and saw nothing but Spanish faces; the fencing master was in the far end of the room, intent upon a sheaf of foils. At any moment de Vaca could have disarmed him, sent his steel flying through air; but that he forebore to do. Instead he opposed his skill, his finesse, his strength, in the attack upon Charles Abbott's fibre. "If I collapse," Charles told himself, "it will be for eternity." Any sense of time was disintegrated in a physical agony which required all his wasting being to combat. But, even worse than that, far more destructive, was the assault upon his mind. If he crumbled ... he thought of himself as dust, his brain a dry powder in his skull. The laughter around him, which had seemed to retreat farther and farther, had ceased, as though it had been lost in the distance. The room, widening to an immensity of space, was silent, charged with a malignant expectancy. Soon, Charles felt, he would fall into unreckoned depths of corrupt shadows, among the obscene figures of the hideously lost. The sweat streaming into his mouth turned thick and salt--blood, from his nose. There was a tumult in his head: his fencing now was the mere waving of a reed. Again and again the Spaniard's foil, as cruelly and vitally direct as at the first pass, struck within Charles' guard. The face of wood, of yellow wood, the eyes that were bits of coal, behind the mask, pursued him into the back of his brain. It stirred, there, a smothering instinct, a dormant memory, and Charles, with a wrenching effort, in a voice thin like a trickle of water from a spigot, said again, "--a most beautiful hand." Sharply, incomprehensibly, it was over. Drooping forward upon his knees, dropping his foil from paralysed fingers, he saw de Vaca, with his mask on an arm, frowning. "Now," Charles Abbott thought luxuriously, "I can faint and be damned to them." The cloud of darkness which flowed over him was empty of the vileness of fear; rather, like the beneficence of night, it was an utterly peaceful remission of the flesh. * * * * *