"Ah!" said he, "we are beginning to understand each other."
I laughed a second time.
"She was over-tall for a woman, my lord," said I, "though of no great stature for a man."
I rose as I spoke the words and confronted him. We were standing on opposite sides of the little table. The smile died off his face; he leaned his hands upon the table and bent slowly over it, searching my looks with horror-stricken eyes.
"What do you mean?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.
"I was the woman. How else should I have got that box?"
"You, you!" He spoke in a queer matter-of-fact tone of assent. All his feeling and passion seemed to have gathered in his eyes.
So we stood waging a battle of looks. And then of a sudden I noticed a crafty, indefinable change in his expression, and from the tail of my eye I saw his fingers working stealthily across the table. I dropped my hand on to the butt of my pistol. With a ready cunning he picked up the gold box and began to examine it with so natural an air of abstraction that I almost wondered whether I had not mistaken his design.
"And so," says he at length, "you would fight with me?"
"If it please you, yes," says I.