The talk had been running on Bucklaw. It had then shifted to Radisson. Gering had crowded home with flagrant emphasis the fact that, while Radisson was a traitor and a scoundrel,--which Iberville himself had admitted with an ironical frankness,--he was also a Frenchman. It was at this point that Iberville remembered, also with something of irony, the words that Jessica had used that afternoon when she came out of the sunshine into the ante-room of the governor’s chamber. She had waved her hand into the distance and had said: “Foolish boy!” He knew very well that that part of the game was turned against him, but with a kind of cheerful recklessness, as was ever his way with odds against him, and he guessed that the odds were with Gering in the matter of Jessica,--he bent across the table and repeated them with an exasperating turn to his imperfect accent. “Foolish boy!” he said, and awaited, not for long, the event. “A fool’s lie,” retorted Gering, in a low, angry voice, and spilled his wine. At that Iberville’s heart thumped in his throat with anger, and the roof of his mouth became dry; never in his life had he been called a liar. The first time that insult strikes a youth of spirit he goes a little mad. But he was very quiet--an ominous sort of quietness, even in a boy. He got to his feet and leaned over the table, speaking in words that dropped on the silence like metal: “Monsieur, there is but one answer.” At this point Morris, roused from his elaborate musings, caught, not very clearly, at the meaning of it all. But he had not time to see more, for just then he was called by the governor, and passed into the room where Mammon, for the moment, perched like a leering, little dwarf upon the shoulders of adventurous gentlemen grown avaricious on a sudden. “Monsieur, there is but one way. Well?” repeated Iberville. “I am ready,” replied Gering, also getting to his feet. The Frenchman was at once alive to certain difficulties. He knew that an envoy should not fight, and that he could ask no one to stand his second; also that it would not be possible to arrange a formal duel between opposites so young as Gering and himself. He sketched this briefly, and the Bostonian nodded moody assent. “Come, then,” said Iberville, “let us find a place. My sword is at my hand. Yours?”