“Oh, don’t mention that girl any more,” murmured Valentin.  “She’s a bore.”

“With all my heart.  But if that is the way you feel about her, why couldn’t you let her alone?”

Valentin shook his head with a fine smile.  “I don’t think you quite understand, and I don’t believe I can make you.  She understood the situation; she knew what was in the air; she was watching us.”

“A cat may look at a king!  What difference does that make?”

“Why, a man can’t back down before a woman.”

“I don’t call her a woman.  You said yourself she was a stone,” cried Newman.

“Well,” Valentin rejoined, “there is no disputing about tastes.  It’s a matter of feeling; it’s measured by one’s sense of honor.”

“Oh, confound your sense of honor!” cried Newman.

“It is vain talking,” said Valentin; “words have passed, and the thing is settled.”

Newman turned away, taking his hat.  Then pausing with his hand on the door, “What are you going to use?” he asked.

“That is for M. Stanislas Kapp, as the challenged party, to decide.  My own choice would be a short, light sword.  I handle it well.  I’m an indifferent shot.”

Newman had put on his hat; he pushed it back, gently scratching his forehead, high up.  “I wish it were pistols,” he said.  “I could show you how to lodge a bullet!”

Valentin broke into a laugh.  “What is it some English poet says about consistency?  It’s a flower or a star, or a jewel.  Yours has the beauty of all three!” But he agreed to see Newman again on the morrow, after the details of his meeting with M. Stanislas Kapp should have been arranged.

In the course of the day Newman received three lines from him, saying that it had been decided that he should cross the frontier, with his adversary, and that he was to take the night express to Geneva.  He should have time, however, to dine with Newman.  In the afternoon Newman called upon Madame de Cintre, but his visit was brief.  She was as gracious and sympathetic as he had ever found her, but she was sad, and she confessed, on Newman’s charging her with her red eyes, that she had been crying.  Valentin had been with her a couple of hours before, and his visit had left her with a painful impression.  He had laughed and gossiped, he had brought her no bad news, he had only been, in his manner, rather more affectionate than usual.  His fraternal tenderness had touched her, and on his departure she had burst into tears.  She had felt as if something strange and sad were going to happen; she had tried to reason away the fancy, and the effort had only given her a headache.  Newman, of course, was perforce tongue-tied about Valentin’s projected duel, and his dramatic talent was not equal to satirizing Madame de Cintre’s presentiment as pointedly as perfect security demanded.  Before he went away he asked Madame de Cintre whether Valentin had seen his mother.