As he spoke, Leoni wiped his bleeding hand with his handkerchief.
"Bah! yours is nothing but a scratch," said the marquis; "I have a more severe wound in the leg; and yet I must dance at the ball to-morrow, so that no one may suspect anything. So stop fussing over your hand, wrap it up and think of something else."
"It is impossible for me to think of anything but that blood. It seems to me that I see a lake of it all about me."
"Your nerves are too delicate, Leoni; you are good for nothing."
"Canaille!" exclaimed Leoni in a tone of hatred and contempt, "but for me you would be a dead man; you retreated like a coward, and you would have been struck from behind. If I had not seen that you were lost, and if your ruin would not have involved mine, I would never have touched that man at such an hour and in such a place. But your infernal obstinacy compelled me to be your accomplice. All that I needed was to commit a murder, to be worthy of your society."
"Don't play the modest man," retorted the marquis; "when you saw that he defended himself, you became a very tiger."
"Ah! yes, it rejoiced my heart to have him die defending himself; for after all I killed him fairly."
"Very fairly; he had postponed the game till the next day, and as you were in a hurry to be done with it, you killed him on the spot."
"Whose fault was it, traitor? Why did you throw yourself on him just as we were separating after we had agreed to meet the next day? Why did you run when you saw that he was armed, and thus compel me to defend you or else be denounced by him to-morrow for having conspired with you to lure him into a trap and murder him? Now I have made myself liable to the scaffold, and yet I am not a murderer. I fought with equal weapons, equal chance, equal courage."
"Yes, he defended himself like a man," said the marquis; "you both performed prodigies of valor. It was a very fine spectacle to see, truly Homeric, was that duel with knives. But I am bound to say that for a Venetian you handle that weapon wretchedly."