"I mean, 'No'. I mean that to-night I ride her," glancing towards Soupir, "across the frontier on my road to Paris, Fontainebleau or Versailles; wherever I may find Louis the King. I mean that every word I have overheard this night he shall hear from me a week hence or earlier. With, too, the names of those who have to-night complotted against his crown, his throne, his life--ah, brute! ruffian!" he broke off to exclaim as, at this moment, he saw Boisfleury creeping towards his mare; the sword the fellow held being shortened in his hand. "So, 'tis her you would first disable thereby to disable me." After which, and grasping his own weapon two feet below the _pas-d'âne_ he swung it round as he advanced towards the creeping, crouching vagabond and, striking him full on the temple with the hilt, felled him to the straw of the stable. "Now," Humphrey said, with a look on his face which possibly none had ever seen there before; a look black as the night outside, savage as the face of an aroused tiger, and with all of the devil that was in him aflame. "Now, be quick with your dirty work. There are but two against one left, and that one draws his thews and sinews from English loins. Be quick or soon there will be but one; the fight will be man to man. As for you, bully, come on." While, as Humphrey spoke, he thrust with his rapier full at the breast of Fleur de Mai and, had the burly scoundrel not stepped aside swiftly as he parried the blade, would have run him through from breast to back. A moment later all was silent in that stable except for the muttered ejaculations, mostly of surprised admiration, which he could not resist, from La Truaumont; the heavy breathing of Fleur de Mai as Humphrey pressed him hardly, and the adder-like hissing of the two men's rapiers as they entwined with one another in a struggle _à outrance_. CHAPTER XVI "_Dieu des Dieux!_" whispered La Truaumont between pale lips, "it must be done. It will fall to me to do it. Yet the pity of it! He is a young lion and brave as a lion, too; one who, if it is not for me, will have put that _luron_ out of the world for ever ere another moment is past. And I am a gentleman, yet must now stoop to be a murderer. I cannot. I cannot. I, Georges du Hamel, Sieur de la Truaumont! I, to become a murderer!" In truth, the scene was a weird one on which the pale, trembling man gazed; that man who, in all his adventurous career, had never known what it was to tremble at the most terrible of impending catastrophes: that man who had looked on tremblings and qualms as fit only for women and puling children.