“Bah! A scratch! Presently.” Then he pointed to the prone limp figure of Holles, from whose head the blood was slowly trickling. “Get a rope, François, and truss him up.” François departed on his errand. “You others, carry Antoine out. Then return for Bobadil. I may have a use for him yet.”
They moved to obey him, and picked up their fellow whom Holles had felled before he, himself, went down.
The Duke was not pleased with them at all. A little more and they might have been too late. But to reproach them with it entailed an admission which this proud, vain man was reluctant to make.
They trooped out obediently, and Buckingham, still very pale, but breathing now more composedly, turned to Nancy with a queer little smile on lips that looked less red than usual.
CHAPTER XX THE CONQUEROR
She had reached that point of endurance at which sensibility becomes mercifully dulled. She sat there, her head resting against the tall back of the chair, her eyes closed, a sense of physical nausea pervading her.
Yet, at the sound of the Duke’s voice gently addressing her, she opened her long blue eyes, set now in deep stains of suffering, and looked at this handsome satyr who stood before her in an attitude of deference that was in itself a mockery.
“Dear Sylvia,” he was saying, “I am beyond measure pained that you should have been subjected to this ... this unseemly spectacle; I need not protest that it was no part of my intention.”