The Hungarian, who read it under the tree, half smiled. The naïveté of it, the touching youth of it, the crude lack of form—was perfect enough to touch his sense of humor. On the back of Dan’s card Poniotowsky scrawled:
“Yes.”
It was a haughty inclination, a salute of honor before the fight.
The meeting place was within sight of the little rustic pavilion of Les Trois Agneaux, celebrated for its pré salé and beignets: the advertisements had confronted Dan everywhere during his wanderings those miserable days. Under a group of chestnut trees in bright feathery flower Prince Poniotowsky and his seconds waited, their frock-coats buttoned up and their gloves and silk hats in their hands. As Blair and his companions came up the others stood uncovered, grim and formal, according to the code.
On the highroad a short distance away ranged the motors which had fetched the gentlemen from Paris, and the car in which the physician had come—an ugly and sinister gathering in the peace and beauty of the serene summer morning.
Finches and thrashes sang in the bushes, over the grass the dew still hung in crystals, and a peasant walking at his horses’ heads on the slow tramp back from the Paris market, was held up and kept stolidly waiting at a few hundred yards away.
Twenty-five paces. They were measured off by the four seconds, and at their signal Dan Blair and the prince took their positions, the revolvers raised perpendicularly in their right hands.
Still more indistinctly the boy saw the sharp-cut picture of it all ... the diving-bell was sinking deeper—deeper—into the sea.
“If I aim,” he said to himself, “I shall kill sure—sure.”