"Certainly not," said Plant. "Take your coat off and hang it on a tombstone, and I'll leave nothing of you but a smear."
"I do not fight with fists," said Rivaulx, contemptuously. "I fight with swords, with steel, with guns or pistols."
Plant shook his head.
"I've none of 'em about me, my son!"
"At the hotel I have swords," cried Rivaulx, eagerly. "I brought them to kill Bramber, who punched my eye in the Rotten Row, and we rolled in bushes. But I will first fight you. Wait and I fetch the swords."
He ran violently into the darkness, and Plant sat on a railing.
"What am I to do? Am I to wait and fight a lunatic? Or shall I go back to the hotel? I think I'll go back. If that raging idiot is found prancing about here with swords, they will run him in."
But he did not know how fast the marquis could run and how near the hotel was. Before he had made up his mind to go, Rivaulx came back again. He flung the swords at Plant's feet.
"Take one and let us begin," he said.
"I think on the whole I'll have both," said Plant, suiting the action to the word. "Now go home, marquis, like a good little boy, and come to the Grand Hotel in the morning and tell me why you want to be hanged in England."