They recommenced.  Weisspriess began to weigh the sagacity of his opponent’s choice of open ground, where he could lengthen the discourse of steel by retreating and retreating, and swinging easily to right or to left.  In the narrow track the sword would have transfixed him after a single feint.  He was amused.  Much of the cat was in his combative nature.  An idea of disabling or dismembering Angelo, and forwarding him to Meran, caused him to trifle further with the edge of the blade.  Angelo took a cut, and turned it on his arm; free of the deadly point, he rushed in and delivered a stab; but Weisspriess saved his breast.  Quick, they resumed their former positions.

‘I am really so unused to this game!’ said Weisspriess, apologetically.

He was pale:  his unsteady breathing, and a deflection of his dripping sword-wrist, belied his coolness.  Angelo plunged full on him, dropped, and again reached his right arm; they hung, getting blood for blood, with blazing interpenetrating eyes; a ghastly work of dark hands at half lock thrusting, and savage eyes reading the fiery pages of the book of hell.  At last the Austrian got loose from the lock and hurled him off.

‘That bout was hotter,’ he remarked; and kept his sword-point out on the whole length of the arm:  he would have scorned another for so miserable a form either of attack or defence.

Vittoria beheld Angelo circling round the point, which met him everywhere; like the minute hand of a clock about to sound his hour, she thought.

He let fall both his arms, as if beaten, which brought on the attack:  by sheer evasion he got away from the sword’s lunge, and essayed a second trial of the bite of steel at close quarters; but the Austrian backed and kept him to the point, darting short alluring thrusts, thinking to tempt him on, or to wind him, and then to have him.  Weisspriess was chilled by a more curious revulsion from this sort of engagement than he at first experienced.  He had become nervously incapable of those proper niceties of sword-play which, without any indecent hacking or maiming, should have stretched Angelo, neatly slain, on the mat of green, before he had a chance.  Even now the sight of the man was distressing to an honourable duellist.  Angelo was scored with blood-marks.  Feeling that he dared not offer another chance to a fellow so desperately close-dealing, Weisspriess thrust fiercely, but delayed his fatal stroke.  Angelo stooped and pulled up a handful of grass and soft earth in his left hand.

‘We have been longer about it than I expected,’ said Weisspriess.

Angelo tightened his fingers about the stringy grasstuft; he stood like a dreamer, leaning over to the sword; suddenly he sprang on it, received the point right in his side, sprang on it again, and seized it in his hand, and tossed it up, and threw it square out in time to burst within guard and strike his stilet below the Austrian’s collar-bone.  The blade took a glut of blood, as when the wolf tears quick at dripping flesh.  It was at a moment when Weisspriess was courteously bantering him with the question whether he was ready, meaning that the affirmative should open the gates of death to him.