ashioned top-hat; with
his right he caught Prince Saradine so ringing a crack across the
face that the white top hat rolled down the steps and one of the blue
flower-pots rocked upon its pedestal.

The prince, whatever he was, was evidently not a coward; he sprang at
his enemy's throat and almost bore him backwards to the grass. But his
enemy extricated himself with a singularly inappropriate air of hurried
politeness.

"That is all right," he said, panting and in halting English. "I have
insulted. I will give satisfaction. Marco, open the case."

The man beside him with the earrings and the big black case proceeded
to unlock it. He took out of it two long Italian rapiers, with splendid
steel hilts and blades, which he planted point downwards in the lawn.
The strange young man standing facing the entrance with his yellow and
vindictive face, the two swords standing up in the turf like two crosses
in a cemetery, and the line of the ranked towers behind, gave it all an
odd appearance of being some barbaric court of justice. But everything
else was unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold
still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as announcing
some small but dreadful destiny.

"Prince Saradine," said the man called Antonelli, "when I was an infant
in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother; my father was
the more fortunate. You did not kill him fairly, as I am going to kill
you. You and my wicked mother took him driving to a lonely pass in
Sicily, flung him down a cliff, and went on your way. I could imitate
you if I chose, but imitating you is too vile. I have followed you all
over the world, and you have always fled from me. But this is the end
of the world--and of you. I have you now, and I give you the chance you
never gave my father. Choose one of those swords."

Prince Saradine, with contracted brows, seemed to hesitate a moment,
but his ears were still singing with the blow, and he sprang forward
and snatched at one of the hilts. Father Brown had also sprung forward,
striving to compose the dispute; but he soon found his personal presence
made matters worse. Saradine was a French freemason and a fierce
atheist, and a priest moved him by the law of contraries. And for the
other man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man
with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner
than a puritan--a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the m