sprung
forward. Like two serpents their rapiers engaged in the candle-light.
The soundless blades crossed and glittered. Then one of them flickered
in a narrow circle, and the brother's rapier went spinning from his hand
across the room.

Young Cardinnock lowered his point at once, and his adversary stepped
back a couple of paces. While a man might count twenty the pair looked
each other in the face, and then the old man, Sir Felix, stepped slowly
forward.

But before he could thrust--for the young Squire still kept his point
lowered--Cicely sprang forward and threw herself across her lover's
breast. There, for all the gentle efforts his left hand made to
disengage her, she clung. She had made her choice. There was no sign
of faltering in her soft eyes, and her father had perforce to hold his
hand.

The old man began to speak. I saw his face distorted with passion and
his lips working. I saw the deep red gather on Cicely's cheeks and the
anger in her lover's eyes. There was a pause as Sir Felix ceased to
speak, and then the young Squire replied. But his sentence stopped
midway: for once more the old man rushed upon him.

This time young Cardinnock's rapier was raised. Girdling Cicely with
his left arm he parried her father's lunge and smote his blade aside.
But such was the old man's passion that he followed the lunge with all
his body, and before his opponent could prevent it, was wounded high in
the chest, beneath the collar-bone.

He reeled back and fell against the table. Cicely ran forward and
caught his hand; but he pushed her away savagely and, with another
clutch at the table's edge, dropped upon the hearth-rug. The young man,
meanwhile, white and aghast, rushed to the table, filled a glass with
wine, and held it to the lips of the wounded man. So the two lovers
knelt.

It was at this point that I who sat and witnessed the tragedy was
assailed by a horror entirely new. Hitherto I had, indeed, seen myself
in Squire Philip Cardinnock; but now I began also to possess his soul
and feel with his feelings, while at the same time I continued to sit
before the glass, a helpless onlooker. I was two men at once; the man
who knelt all unaware of what was coming and the man who waited in the
arm-chair, incapable of word or movement, yet gifted with a torturing
prescience. And as I sat this was what I saw:--

The brother, as I knelt there oblivious of all but the wounded man,
stepped across the ro