in Marius, sneering.

"Ah!" muttered Fortunio. "He has the fever? The fever is something.
But--but--accidents will happen."

"Florimond was ever an indifferent swordsman," murmured Marius dreamily,
as if communing with himself.

The captain wheeled upon him once more.

"Why, then, Monsieur Marius," said he, "since that is so and you are
skilled--as skilled as am I, or more--and he has a fever, where is the
need to hire me to the task?"

"Where?" echoed Marius. "What affair may that be of yours? We ask you
to name a price on which you will do this thing. Have done with
counter-questions."

Marius was skilled with the foils, as Fortunio said, but he cared not
for unbaited steel, and he was conscious of it, so that the captain's
half-sneer had touched him on the raw. But he was foolish to take that
tone in answer. There was a truculent, Southern pride in the ruffler
which sprang immediately into life and which naught that they could say
thereafter would stamp out.

"Must I say again that you mistake your man?" was his retort, and as
he spoke he rose, as though to signify that the subject wearied him and
that his remaining to pursue it must be idle. "I am not of those to
whom you can say: `I need such an one killed, name me the price at which
you'll be his butcher."'

The Marquise wrung her hands in pretty mimicry of despair, and poured
out soothing words, as one might pour oil upon stormy waters. The
Seneschal sat in stolid silence, a half-scared spectator of this odd
scene, what time the Marquise talked and talked until she had brought
Fortunio back to some measure of subjection.

Such reasoning as she made use of she climaxed by an offer of no less a
sum than a hundred pistoles. The captain licked his lips and pulled at
his mustachios. For all his vaunted scorn of being a butcher at a price,
now that he heard the price he seemed not half so scornful.

"Tell me again the thing that you need doing and the manner of it," said
he, as one who was moved to reconsider. She told him, and when she had
done he made a compromise.

"If I go upon this business, madame, I go not alone."

"Oh, as for that," said Marius, "it shall be as you will. Take what men
you want with you."

"And hang with them afterwards, maybe," he sneered, his insolence
returning. "The hundred pistoles would avail me little then. Look you,
Monsieur de Condillac, and you, madame, if I go, I'll need to take with
me a better hostage than the whole