thrust of Nevers?"

A new silence seemed to fall upon the company, and for the second time
since the Gascon and the Norman had entered the room the hunchback took a
part in the conversation, closing his book as he did so, but carefully
keeping a finger between the pages to mark the place. "I don't believe in
secret thrusts," he said, decisively.

The Gascon moved a little away from Staupitz and a little nearer to AEsop,
whom he looked at fixedly. The hunchback sustained his gaze with his
habitual air of cold indifference. Cocardasse spoke: "You will, if you
ever face Louis de Nevers. Now, Passepoil, here, and I, we are, I
believe, held in general repute as pretty good swordsmen--"

Passepoil interrupted, stuttering furiously in his excitement: "But he
touched us with that secret thrust in our own school in Paris--"

Cocardasse completed his friend's statement: "Three times, here on the
forehead, just between the eyes."

Passepoil labored his point: "Devil take us if we could find a parry for
it."

Cocardasse summed up his argument, gloomily: "They say it has never been
parried, never will be parried."

Again an awkward silence reigned. With a shrug of his shoulders, AEsop
resumed his studies, finding Aretino more diverting than such nonsense.
Breton stared at Teuton; Italian interrogated Spaniard; Portuguese
questioned Biscayan. The affairs of the party seemed to be at a
dead-lock. The fact was that Staupitz and his little band of babies, as
he was pleased to call them, were not really of the same social standing
in the world of cutthroats as Gascon Cocardasse and Norman Passepoil.
Cocardasse and his companion were recognized fencing-masters in Paris,
well esteemed, if not of the highest note, whereas Staupitz was no better
than an ordinary bully-broker, and his so-styled children no more than
provincial rascallions. It was not for them, and they knew it, to display
such knowledge of the great world as might be aired by Cocardasse and
Passepoil, and when Cocardasse spoke with so much significance about the
thrust of Nevers, and questioned them with so much insistence about the
thrust of Nevers, it was plain that he spoke from the brimmings of a
wisdom richer than their own. Staupitz, who was in some sense a son of
Paris, if only an adopted son, and that, indeed, by process of
self-adoption, knew enough of Olympian matters to be aware that there was
an illustrious gentleman that was Duke of Nevers, whom he was equ