eisspriess.

Angelo tightened his fingers about the stringy grasstuft; he stood like a
dreamer, leaning over to the sword; suddenly he sprang on it, received
the point right in his side, sprang on it again, and seized it in his
hand, and tossed it up, and threw it square out in time to burst within
guard and strike his stilet below the Austrian's collar-bone. The blade
took a glut of blood, as when the wolf tears quick at dripping flesh. It
was at a moment when Weisspriess was courteously bantering him with the
question whether he was ready, meaning that the affirmative should open
the gates of death to him.

The stilet struck thrice. Weisspriess tottered, and hung his jaw like a
man at a spectre: amazement was on his features.

'Remember Broncini and young Branciani!'

Angelo spoke no other words throughout the combat.

Weisspriess threw himself forward on a feeble lunge of his sword, and let
the point sink in the ground, as a palsied cripple supports his frame,
swayed, and called to Angelo to come on, and try another stroke,
another--one more! He fell in a lump: his look of amazement was
surmounted by a strong frown.

His enemy was hanging above him panting out of wide nostrils, like a
hunter's horse above the long-tongued quarry, when Vittoria came to them.

She reached her strength to the wounded man to turn his face to heaven.

He moaned, 'Finish me'; and, as he lay with his back to earth,
'Good-evening to the old army!'

A vision of leaping tumbrils, and long marching columns about to deploy,
passed before his eyelids: he thought he had fallen on the battle-field,
and heard a drum beat furiously in the back of his head; and on streamed
the cavalry, wonderfully caught away to such a distance that the figures
were all diminutive, and the regimental colours swam in smoke, and the
enemy danced a plume here and there out of the sea, while his mother and
a forgotten Viennese girl gazed at him with exactly the same unfamiliar
countenance, and refused to hear that they were unintelligible in the
roaring of guns and floods and hurrahs, and the thumping of the
tremendous big drum behind his head--'somewhere in the middle of the
earth': he tried to explain the locality of that terrible drumming noise
to them, and Vittoria conceived him to be delirious; but he knew that he
was sensible; he knew her and Angelo and the mountain-pass, and that he
had a cigar-case in his pocket worked in embroidery of crimson, blue, and