“What are you staring at?” asked Turnbull.  “Do you see the bobbies?”

“I see Jerusalem,” said Evan, “all covered with the shields and standards of the Saracens.”

“Jerusalem!” said Turnbull, laughing.  “Well, we’ve taken the only inhabitant into captivity.”

And he picked up his sword and made it whistle like a boy’s wand.

“I beg your pardon,” said MacIan, dryly.  “Let us begin.”

MacIan made a military salute with his weapon, which Turnbull copied or parodied with an impatient contempt; and in the stillness of the garden the swords came together with a clear sound like a bell.  The instant the blades touched, each felt them tingle to their very points with a personal vitality, as if they were two naked nerves of steel.  Evan had worn throughout an air of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy of one who wants nothing.  But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy of one who wants something and will care for nothing else.  And this was seen suddenly; for the instant Evan engaged he disengaged and lunged with an infernal violence.  His opponent with a desperate promptitude parried and riposted; the parry only just succeeded, the riposte failed.  Something big and unbearable seemed to have broken finally out of Evan in that first murderous lunge, leaving him lighter and cooler and quicker upon his feet.  He fell to again, fiercely still, but now with a fierce caution.  The next moment Turnbull lunged; MacIan seemed to catch the point and throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a thunderbolt, when a sound paralysed him; another sound beside their ringing weapons.  Turnbull, perhaps from an equal astonishment, perhaps from chivalry, stopped also and forebore to send his sword through his exposed enemy.

“What’s that?” asked Evan, hoarsely.

A heavy scraping sound, as of a trunk being dragged along a littered floor, came from the dark shop behind them.

“The old Jew has broken one of his strings, and he’s crawling about,” said Turnbull.  “Be quick!  We must finish before he gets his gag out.”

“Yes, yes, quick!  On guard!” cried the Highlander.  The blades crossed again with the same sound like song, and the men went to work again with the same white and watchful faces.  Evan, in his impatience, went back a little to his wildness.  He made windmills, as the French duellists say, and though he was probably a shade the better fencer of the two, he found the other’s point pass his face twice so close as almost to graze his cheek.  The second time he realized the actual possibility of defeat and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of anger.  He narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations:  he fenced (as the swordsman’s boast goes), in a wedding ring; he turned Turnbull’s thrusts with a maddening and almost mechanical click, like that of a machine.  Whenever Turnbull’s sword sought to go over that other mere white streak it