'Swords or pistols, monsieur?'
'Oh, the devil—pistols, of course,' replied Cadbury, as if he was in the habit of fighting a duel every morning.
'Merci, monsieur, we shall not fail you, and now good evening—bon soir.'
'Bon soir.'
The manner of Captain Gabion, who had been eyeing him with some contempt, twirling his moustache the while, changed completely now, and, bowing with studious politeness, he withdrew to report progress to Bevil Goring.
CHAPTER XXII.
IN THE LUNETTE ST. LAURENT.
At first a kind of—shall we say it?—savage joy and exultation swelled up in the breast of Goring at the prospect of being face to face with Cadbury again, and already in fancy he was covering with his pistol the spectrum of the peer's thick-set, pudgy person, for he had at first serious doubts—though they were both on the Continent—that the latter would accept his challenge.
'Well, I have faced much in my short time, and figured in many things; but I never thought to do so in such an old-fashioned affair as a duel!' he said, with a grim smile, to his new friend Gabion.
And he wondered what Tony Dalton, Jerry Wilmot, and others of the battalion now far away beyond the equator, would think of the event, when tidings would reach them that he had been shot by Lord Cadbury, or had shot the latter—and in a duel!