No one who has not heard that one word pronounced by the lips of a Frenchman can conceive how much of savage enmity and deadly purpose it implies. It is the challenge which, if unaccepted, stamps cowardice forever on the man who declines it: from that hour all equality ceases between those whom a combat had placed on the same footing. “Sortons!” The word rang in my ears, and tingled through my very heart, while a host of different impulses swayed me,--shame, sorrow, wounded pride, all struggling for the mastery: but above them all, a better and a higher spirit,--the firm resolve, come what would, to suffer no provocation De Beauvais could offer, to make me stand opposite to him as an enemy. “What am I to think, sir?” said he, with a voice scarcely articulate from passion,--“what am I to think of your hesitation? or why do you stand inactive here? Is it that you are meditating what new insult can be added to those you have heaped on me?” “No, sir,” I replied, firmly; “so far from thinking of offence, I am but too sorry for the words I have already spoken. I should have remembered, and remembering, should have made allowance for, the strength of partisan feelings, which have their origin in a noble, but, as I believe, a mistaken source.” “Indeed!” interrupted he, in mockery. “Is it, then, come to this? Am I, a Frenchman born, to be lectured on my loyalty and allegiance by a foreign mercenary?” “Not even that taunt, De Beauvais, shall avail you anything. I am firm in my resolve.” “_Pardieu!_ then,” cried he, with savage energy, “there remains but this!” As he spoke, he leaped from his chair, and sprang towards me. In so doing, however, his knee struck the table, and with a groan of agony, he reeled back and fell on the floor, while from his reopened wound a torrent of blood gushed out and deluged the room. For a second or two he motioned me away with his hand; but as his weakness increased, he lay passive and unresisting, and suffered me to arrest the bleeding by such means as I was able to practise. It was a long time ere I could stanch the gaping orifice, which had been inflicted by a sabre, and cut clean through the high boot and deep into the thigh. Fortunately for his recovery, he had himself succeeded in getting off the boot before, and the wound lay open to my surgical skill. Lifting him cautiously in my arms, I laid him on the bed, and moistened his lips with a little wine. Still the debility continued,--no signs of returning strength were there; but his features, pale and fallen, were glazed with a cold sweat that hung in heavy drops upon his brow and forehead.