all counts
against me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" She was rosy with the
exhilarating exercise and the biting of the frosty breeze. Her beauty
gave forth a new ray.

Deep in her heart she was pleased to have him master her so superbly;
but as the days passed she never said so, never gave over trying to
make him feel the touch of her foil. She did not know that her eyes
were getting through his guard, that her dimples were stabbing his
heart to its middle.

"You have other advantages," he replied, "which far overbalance my
greater stature and stronger muscles." Then after a pause he added:
"After all a girl must be a girl."

Something in his face, something in her heart, startled her so that she
made a quick little move like that of a restless bird.

"You are beautiful and that makes my eyes and my hand uncertain," he
went on. "Were I fencing with a man there would be no glamour."

He spoke in English, which he did not often do in conversation with
her. It was a sign that he was somewhat wrought upon. She followed his
rapid words with difficulty; but she caught from them a new note of
feeling. He saw a little pale flare shoot across her face and thought
she was angry.

"You should not use your dimples to distract my vision," he quickly
added, with a light laugh. "It would be no worse for me to throw my hat
in your face!"

His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his
eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a
current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did.
Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of
impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He
was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose
family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high
attainments. She magnified him so that he was diffused in her
imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning
air--and as beautiful.

"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes
droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain
naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been
too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when
in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I
shall not fence with you again." She laughed, but there was no joyous
freedom in the sound.

"Why, Alice--my dear