Staupitz's puzzled, angry face travelled round the room, ranging over the Gascon, the Norman, the Spaniard, the Portuguese, the Biscayan, the Breton, and the hunchback. "Thunder and weather!" he cried; "is not nine to one good enough odds for you?" The others, with the exception of Æsop, who still seemed to read as peacefully in his book as if he were alone in the room, appeared inclined to applaud the question of their chief, but Cocardasse was not in the least impressed by the retort. He replied to Staupitz's query with another--"Have you never heard of the secret thrust of Nevers?" A new silence seemed to fall upon the company, and for the second time since the Gascon and the Norman had entered the room the hunchback took a part in the conversation, closing his book as he did so, but carefully keeping a finger between the pages to mark the place. "I don't believe in secret thrusts," he said, decisively. The Gascon moved a little away from Staupitz and a little nearer to Æsop, whom he looked at fixedly. The hunchback sustained his gaze with his habitual air of cold indifference. Cocardasse spoke: "You will, if you ever face Louis de Nevers. Now, Passepoil, here, and I, we are, I believe, held in general repute as pretty good swordsmen--" Passepoil interrupted, stuttering furiously in his excitement: "But he touched us with that secret thrust in our own school in Paris--" Cocardasse completed his friend's statement: "Three times, here on the forehead, just between the eyes." Passepoil labored his point: "Devil take us if we could find a parry for it." Cocardasse summed up his argument, gloomily: "They say it has never been parried, never will be parried."