Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/386

THE AMERICAN "That's for M. Stanislas Kapp, as the challenged party, to decide. My own choice would be a short, light sword. I handle it well. I'm an indifferent shot."

Newman had put on his hat; he pushed it back, gently scratching his forehead high up. "I wish it were guns," he said. "I could show you how to hold one."

Valentin gave him a hard look and then broke into a laugh. "Murderer!" he cried with some intensity, but agreeing to see him again on the morrow, after the details of the meeting with M. Stanislas Kapp should have been arranged.

In the course of the day Newman received three lines from him to the effect that it had been decided he should cross the frontier with his adversary, and that he was accordingly to take the night express to Geneva. They should have time, however, to dine together. In the afternoon Newman called on Madame de Cintré for the single daily hour of reinvoked and reasserted confidence—a solemnity but the more exquisite with repetition—to which she had, a little strangely, given him to understand it was convenient, important, in fact vital to her, that their communion, for their strained interval, should be restricted, even though this reduced him for so many other recurrent hours, the hours of evening in particular, the worst of the probation, to the state of a restless, prowling, time-keeping ghost, a taker of long night-walks through streets that affected him at moments as the alleys of a great darkened bankrupt bazaar. But his visit to-day had a worry to reckon with—all the more that it had as well so much of 356