“Miguel! Miguel! you have your pistol undischarged. Faint as you are, you cannot miss me at this range.”
“Stand away, then, Nicanor.”
Nicanor stood up, tearing his coat apart.
“Here, here! to my heart, dearest!”
Miguel, supporting himself on his left hand, raised his pistol swiftly, and shot Mademoiselle Suzanne through the breast. Then he fell back to the floor.
“That is the short way to it, Nicanor. Confess, after all, I am the better shot. Now we are reunited for ever.”
Suzanne had not a word to say to that compact. She lay in a heap, like the sweetest of dressmaker’s dummies overturned.
The landlord raised a terrible outcry.
“Messieurs! I am ruined, unless you witness to the truth of this catastrophe!”
“I, for one, will witness,” said de Bellenglise, very white. “Mademoiselle, it is plain to the humorist, has only reaped what she sowed. But I do not envy M. Nicanor his survival.”