justice.

There was but the space of a breath for the conflict in the priest's
heart, yet during that little time he reasoned the case and quoted
scripture to himself.

"Domine, percutimus in gladio?" rang through his mind. "Lord, shall we
smite with the sword?"

Hamilton seemed to make answer to this with a dazzling display of
skill. The rapiers sang a strange song above the sleeping girl, a
lullaby with coruscations of death in every keen note.

Father Beret was thinking of Alice. His brain, playing double,
calculated with lightning swiftness the chances and movements of that
whirlwind rush of fight, while at the same time it swept through a
retrospect of all the years since Alice came into his life. How he had
watched her grow and bloom; how he had taught her, trained her mind and
soul and body to high things, loved her with a fatherly passion
unbounded, guarded her from the coarse and lawless influences of her
surroundings. Like the tolling of an infinitely melancholy bell, all
this went through his breast and brain, and, blending with a furious
current of whatever passions were deadly dangerous in his nature, swept
as a storm bearing its awful force into his sword-arm.

The Englishman was a lion, the priest a gladiator. The stars aloft in
the vague, dark, yet splendid, amphitheater were the audience. It was a
question. Would the thumbs go down or up? Life and death held the
chances even; but it was at the will of Heaven, not of the stars. "Hoc
habet" must follow the stroke ordered from beyond the astral clusters
and the dusky blue.

Hamilton pressed, nay rushed, the fight with a weight and at a pace
which could not last. But Father Beret withstood him so firmly that he
made no farther headway; he even lost some ground a moment later.

"You damned Jesuit hypocrite!" he snarled; "you lowest of a vile
brotherhood of liars!"

Then he rushed again, making a magnificent show of strength, quickness
and accuracy. The sparks hissed and crackled from the rasping and
ringing blades.

Father Beret was, in truth, a Jesuit, and as such a zealot; but he was
not a liar or a hypocrite. Being human, he resented an insult. The
saintly spirit in him was strong, yet not strong enough to breast the
indignation which now dashed against it. For a moment it went down.

"Liar and scoundrel yourself!" he retorted, hoarsely forcing the words
out of his throat. "Spawn of a beastly breed!"

Hamilton saw and felt a change pass over