CHAPTER XXIX--THE PICTURE OF IT ALL

As far as his knowing anything of the customs of it all, it was like leading a lamb to slaughter.

Villebon, lovely, vernal, at a later hour the spot for gay breakfasts and gentle rendezvous, had been designated for the meeting between Dan and Poniotowsky. There in his motor he gave up his effort to set his thoughts clear. Nothing settled down. Even the ground they flew over, the trees with their chestnut plumes, blurred, were indistinct, nebulous, as if seen through a diving-bell under the sea. Fear--he didn't know the word. He wasn't afraid--it wasn't that; yet he had a certainty that it was all up with him. He was young--very young--and he hadn't done much with the job. His father would have been ashamed of him. Then all his thoughts went to Her. The two men in the motor floated off and she sat there as she had sat yesterday in her marvelously pretty clothes--her little coral shoes.

He had held those bright, little feet in his hand on the Thames day: they had just filled his great hands. Mechanically he spread out his firm, broad palms on the soft shoes. Letty Lane--Letty Lane--a shiver passed through his body; the sense of her, the touch of her, the kisses he had taken, the way she had blown up against him like a cloud--a cloud that, as he held her, became the substance of Paradise. This brought him back to physical life, brutally. He was too young to die.

Those little, red shoes would dance on his grave. Was she asleep now? How would she know? What would she know?

Then Letty Lane, too, spirited away, and the boy's thoughts turned to the man he was to meet. "The affairs are purely formal," he had heard some one say, "an exchange of balls, without serious results."

One of his companions offered Blair a cigar. He refused, the idea sickened him. Here the gentlemen exchanged glances, and one murmured, "Is he afraid?"

The other shrugged.

"Not astonishing--he's a child."

At this Dan glanced up and smiled--what Lily, Duchess of Breakwater, had called his divine young smile. The two secretly were ashamed--he was charming.

As they got out of the motor Dan said:

"I want to ask a question of Prince Poniotowsky--if it is allowed. I'll write it on my card."

After a conference between Prince Poniotowsky's seconds and Dan's, the slip was handed the prince.

"If you get out all right, will you marry Miss Lane? I shall be glad to know."

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."

Blair heard the command: "Fire!" and supposed that after that he fired.