‘No," said Ricky, standing up. "1 never liked it. It seems— Dago, somehow. Like sticking a man with a knife. But" and sheer vanity bubbled out of him, "there was a time when I couldn't fly a plane, either. Fencing? I could learn it as easy as winkingl"
"Indeed?" mocked Stannard, showing teeth against the red face. "When I saw you, you were such a very little pious boy." Ricky whipped round, his grey eyes wide open in the dazzle of cross-light
"I may have been no giant then," he said. "But I could put-the-weight twenty-seven feet three inches when I was eleven years old, and I've got a cup to prove it How would you like to try a little strength-test now?"
"Thank you. But I have another kind of test in about ten minutes."
"Unquestionably," declared Dr. Laurier, "a Toledo blade. Note also the ‘Christus Imperat’ engraved on the blade near the hilt and the beautifully, wrought pattern on the cup-hilt itself. I must have more light Excuse me."
And he almost ran out of the room into the passage.
Martin too, having handed his lamp to Ricky, had drawn out a rapier to his taste. Like Laurier's, it was no clumsy double-edge blade; like Laurier's it was thin and tapering, for play with the point It had a large plain cup-hilt with broad quillons, so finely balanced in the hand that it seemed to bear its own weight
"Excuse, me," Martin said — and also hurried out of the room.
It wasn't he told himself, that he felt fear. But he felt shut up in there. The condemned cell, twenty feet square, with its flowered peeling wallpaper, boiled with hatred and despair. He could have sworn (though he knew this for an illusion) that the rocking-chair swung a little.
But one touch of panic, real or only half-real, acts on human beings as on animals. Ruth, Stannard, and Ricky crowded after him.