for so unpardonable have been the offences of Monsieur de Lery towards
Monsieur Lecour that _only one of them must live_."

"Then let him kill Lecour instead of some one of his comrades, who would
make life intolerable to him were he to show himself such a coward as
you have proposed. Has he not proved a brave man to have fought so
often, and with that fellow so below his dignity? As for me, knowing
what I owe to myself, I should refuse most scrupulously to compromise
myself with any one who was not of my station. Were I attacked in a
street by such a man, I should defend my life with the greatest spirit;
but never under the arrangements of an affair _en regle_. Such has
always been my way of conduct, according to the truest principles of
honour."

"Of honour!" the stranger exclaimed sarcastically; "and who taught de
Lery to apply these principles to a fellow Bodyguard?"

"He acted, as I have said, under the advice of his superior officers,
especially of Monsieur de Villerai, who is his relative, and a Canadian
gentleman of distinguished ancestry."

"Ancestry! de Villerai of distinguished ancestry! This, then, is the man
who has undertaken to crush my friend Lecour on the question of
extraction! All the world knows that his paternal uncle, of the same
name as he, is a common carter in Quebec, and his children in the last
ditch of squalor and degradation."

De Lotbiniere's countenance changed as quickly as though he had been
stabbed.

"To the sorrow of his family, you speak but too truly, although the
father was educated very differently. His misfortune was to have married
a fool, who supposed herself obliged, as the wife of a gentleman, to
dissipate their substance in innumerable petty entertainments; but from
this the only rightful conclusion to be drawn is that that branch has
derogated from _noblesse_, and can no longer pretend to enjoy for the
future the state of its ancestors. But Monsieur Lecour must know well
that, as for the branch of the Chevalier de Villerai, the further back
you go in his family tree in Canada the more brightly his _noblesse_
stands forth in splendour."

"His grandfather," the stranger retorted scornfully, "was a runaway
bankrupt out of the prison of Rouen. And who is this de Lery? His
father, during the siege of Quebec, instead of confronting the enemy,
went buying up cattle in the parishes to sell over again to the
commissariat at the expense of the misery of an expiring people."