Back, step by step, he was forced, till he felt his shoulders touch the wall.  He was beginning to suffer cruelly.  A warmth on his side told him that his old wound had opened and was bleeding.  Good God! and if this old man at whom he had laughed should kill him!  With a desperate return he succeeded in regaining the open.  He tried the offensive, it was too late.  The marquis, describing a circle, toppled over a candle, which rolled across the floor and was snuffed in its own melting wax.

The marquis’s eyes burned like carbuncles; his blade was like living light.  He spoke.

“I am old; beware of old dogs that have teeth.”

Round and round they circled, back and forth.  D’Herouville was fighting for his life.  His own wonderful mastery, and this alone, kept the life in his body.  Sometimes it seemed that he must be in a dream, the victim of some terrible nightmare.  For the marquis’s face did not look human, animated as it was with the lust to kill.

“God!” burst from the count’s cracked lips.  His sword was rolling at his feet.  It was the end.  He shut his eyes.

The marquis drew back his arm to send the blade home, and there came a change.  At the very moment when victory must have been his, he staggered, a black mist filming his eyes.  The magic blade slipped from his grasp and clanged to the floor.  He tried to save himself, but he could not.  He fell by the side of his sword and lay there silent.  His strength, had been superhuman, the last flare of a burnt-out fire.

“Good God, and I never touched him!” gasped, D’Herouville.  He was covered with a cold sweat.  “A moment more and I had been a dead man!” He brushed his eyes, and his hand shook with a transient palsy.

There was a tableau:  the aged noble stretched out beside his rapier, D’Herouville leaning against the wall and wild-eyed . . . and a black-robed figure standing in the doorway.

“Have you killed him?” asked the black-robed figure, stepping into the room.

D’Herouville gazed at him, incapable of speaking.

“Have you killed him, I say?” repeated Brother Jacques.

D’Herouville choked, and presently found his voice.  “I have not even touched him.  God is witness!  He has been stricken by a vapor, or he is dead.”

“It is well for you, Monsieur, that your sword did not touch him.  You had better go.”

The count’s hand shook so that he could hardly put his rapier into the scabbard.  With a dazed glance at the marquis, who had not yet stirred, with another glance at the priest, he passed out, holding the flat of his hand against his side.

Immediately Brother Jacques bent over the fallen man.

“He lives; that is well.  So I must go on to the end.”

He poured out some wine and bathed the marquis’s temples and wrists.  Next he lifted the old man in his arms and carried him to the bed, undressed him, and covered him over.  He drew a chair to the side of the bed and sat down, waiting and watching.  Occasionally his glance wandered, to the sinking candles, to the moon outside, from the marbled face on the pillow to the empty wine-glass on the small table.  Once he recollected seeing an envelope within a hand’s span of the glass.