At this Dan glanced up and smiled—what Lily, Duchess of Breakwater, had called his divine young smile. The two secretly were ashamed—he was charming. As they got out of the motor Dan said: “I want to ask a question of Prince Poniotowsky—if it is allowed. I’ll write it on my card.” After a conference between Prince Poniotowsky’s seconds and Dan’s, the slip was handed the prince. “If you get out all right, will you marry Miss Lane? I shall be glad to know.” The Hungarian, who read it under the tree, half smiled. The naïveté of it, the touching youth of it, the crude lack of form—was perfect enough to touch his sense of humor. On the back of Dan’s card Poniotowsky scrawled: “Yes.” It was a haughty inclination, a salute of honor before the fight. The meeting place was within sight of the little rustic pavilion of Les Trois Agneaux, celebrated for its _pré salé_ and _beignets_: the advertisements had confronted Dan everywhere during his wanderings those miserable days. Under a group of chestnut trees in bright feathery flower Prince Poniotowsky and his seconds waited, their frock-coats buttoned up and their gloves and silk hats in their hands. As Blair and his companions came up the others stood uncovered, grim and formal, according to the code. On the highroad a short distance away ranged the motors which had fetched the gentlemen from Paris, and the car in which the physician had come—an ugly and sinister gathering in the peace and beauty of the serene summer morning. Finches and thrashes sang in the bushes, over the grass the dew still hung in crystals, and a peasant walking at his horses’ heads on the slow tramp back from the Paris market, was held up and kept stolidly waiting at a few hundred yards away. Twenty-five paces. They were measured off by the four seconds, and at their signal Dan Blair and the prince took their positions, the revolvers raised perpendicularly in their right hands. Still more indistinctly the boy saw the sharp-cut picture of it all ... the diving-bell was sinking deeper—deeper—into the sea. “If I aim,” he said to himself, “I shall kill sure—sure.” Blair heard the command: “Fire!” and supposed that after that he fired. CHAPTER XXX—SODAWATER FOUNTAIN GIRL His next sensation was that a warm stream flowed about his heart. “My life’s blood,” he could dimly think, “my heart’s blood.” Redder than coral, more precious, more costly than any gift his millions could have bought her. “I’ve spent it for the girl I love.” The stream pervaded him, caressed him, folded his limbs about, became an enchanted sea on which he floated, and its color changed from crimson to coral pale, and then to white, and became a cold, cold polar sea—and he lay on it like a frozen man, whose exploration had been in vain, and above him Greenland’s icy mountains rose like emerald, on every side.