voice at once eager and deprecating.

The voice was too polite for good manners. It was incongruous with the
eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane
and free man. It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though
rather loose physique of the man who spoke. At the first glance he
looked a fine animal, with curling gold beard and hair, and blue eyes,
unusually bright. It was only at the second glance that the mind felt
a sudden and perhaps unmeaning irritation at the way in which the gold
beard retreated backwards into the waistcoat, and the way in which the
finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling its way. And it was
only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes,
which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with
intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a
heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the
loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their
extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics. But
a closer examination of his attire would have shown that even in the
tropics it would have been unique; but it was all woven according to
some hygienic texture which no human being had ever heard of before, and
which was absolutely necessary even for a day's health. He wore a huge
broad-brimmed hat, equally hygienic, very much at the back of his head,
and his voice coming out of so heavy and hearty a type of man was, as I
have said, startlingly shrill and deferential.

"I'm sure you'll excuse my speaking to you," he said. "Now, I wonder if
you are in some little difficulty which, after all, we could settle very
comfortably together? Now, you don't mind my saying this, do you?"

The face of both combatants remained somewhat solid under this appeal.
But the stranger, probably taking their silence for a gathering shame,
continued with a kind of gaiety:

"So you are the young men I have read about in the papers. Well, of
course, when one is young, one is rather romantic. Do you know what I
always say to young people?"

A blank silence followed this gay inquiry. Then Turnbull said in a
colourless voice:

"As I was forty-seven last birthday, I probably came into the world too
soon for the experience."

"Very good, very good," said the friendly person. "Dry Scotch humour.
Dry Scotch humour. Well now. I understand that you two people want to
fight a duel. I suppose