back, lowered her point and laughed.

"Je vous salue, Monsieur Beverley!" she cried, with childlike show of
delight. "Did you feel the button?"

"Yes, I felt it," he said with frank acknowledgment in his voice, "it
was cleverly done. Now give me a chance to redeem myself."

He began more carefully and found that she, too, was on her best
mettle; but it was a short bout, as before. Alice seemed to give him an
easy opening and he accepted it with a thrust; then something happened
that he did not understand. The point of his foil was somehow caught
under his opponent's hilt-guard while her blade seemed to twist around
his; at the same time there was a wring and a jerk, the like of which
he had never before felt, and he was disarmed, his wrist and fingers
aching with the wrench they had received.

Of course the thing was not new; he had been disarmed before; but her
trick of doing it was quite a mystery to him, altogether different from
any that he had ever seen.

"Vous me pardonnerez, Monsieur," she mockingly exclaimed, picking up
his weapon and offering the hilt to him. "Here is your sword!"

"Keep it," he said, folding his arms and trying to look unconcerned,
"you have captured it fairly. I am at your mercy; be kind to me."

Madame Roussillon and Jean, the hunchback, hearing the racket of the
foils had come out to see and were standing agape.

"You ought to be ashamed, Alice," said the dame in scolding approval of
what she had done; "girls do not fence with gentlemen."

"This girl does," said Alice.

"And with extreme disaster to this gentleman," said Beverley, laughing
in a tone of discomfiture and resignation.

"Ah, Mo'sieu', there's nothing but disaster where she goes," complained
Madame Roussillon, "she is a destroyer of everything. Only yesterday
she dropped my pink bowl and broke it, the only one I had."

"And just to think," said Beverley, "what would have been the condition
of my heart had we been using rapiers instead of leather-buttoned
foils! She would have spitted it through the very center."

"Like enough," replied the dame indifferently. "She wouldn't wince,
either,--not she."

Alice ran into the house with the foils and Beverley followed.

"We must try it over again some day soon," he said; "I find that you
can show me a few points. Where did you learn to fence so admirably? Is
Monsieur Roussillon your master?"

"Indeed he isn't," she quickly replied, "he is but a bungling
swordsman. My