"Do I dream? Is this a pleasantry? Or am I to understand that you have
been hatching an affair of honour for sixteen years?"
"It has clung to me for that length of time. That is my precise meaning.
The quarrel itself is not to be explained easily. We met on the ground
several times during that time, of course."
"What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can
account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution
which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned emigre in a
low tone. "Who's your adversary?" he asked a little louder.
"My adversary? His name is Feraud."
Shadowy in his tricorne and old-fashioned clothes, like a bowed, thin
ghost of the ancien regime, the Chevalier voiced a ghostly memory. "I
can remember the feud about little Sophie Derval, between Monsieur de
Brissac, Captain in the Bodyguards, and d'Anjorrant (not the pock-marked
one, the other--the Beau d'Anjorrant, as they called him). They met
three times in eighteen months in a most gallant manner.
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