“Are you Englishmen?” asked the boy without making a move to comply with their demand. 

 “That we be, my son,” said Beauchamp. 

 “Then it were better that I die than do your bidding, for all Englishmen are pigs and I loathe them as becomes a gentleman of France. I do not uncover my body to the eyes of swine.” 

 The knights, at first taken back by this unexpected outbreak, finally burst into uproarious laughter. 

 “Indeed,” cried Paul of Merely, “spoken as one of the King’s foreign favorites might speak, and they ever told the good God’s truth. But come lad, we would not harm you—do as I bid.” 

 “No man lives who can harm me while a blade hangs at my side,” answered the boy, “and as for doing as you bid, I take orders from no man other than my father.” 

 Beauchamp and Greystoke laughed aloud at the discomfiture of Paul of Merely, but the latter’s face hardened in anger, and without further words he strode forward with outstretched hand to tear open the boy’s leathern jerkin, but met with the gleaming point of a sword and a quick sharp, “En garde!” from the boy. 

 There was naught for Paul of Merely to do but draw his own weapon, in self-defense, for the sharp point of the boy’s sword was flashing in and out against his unprotected body, inflicting painful little jabs, and the boy’s tongue was murmuring low-toned taunts and insults as it invited him to draw and defend himself or be stuck “like the English pig you are.” 

 Paul of Merely was a brave man and he liked not the idea of drawing against this stripling, but he argued that he could quickly disarm him without harming the lad, and he certainly did not care to be further humiliated before his comrades. 

 But when he had drawn and engaged his youthful antagonist, he discovered that, far from disarming him, he would have the devil’s own job of it to keep from being killed. 

 Never in all his long years of fighting had he faced such an agile and dexterous enemy, and as they backed this way and that about the room, great beads of sweat stood upon the brow of Paul of Merely, for he realized that he was fighting for his life against a superior swordsman. 

 The loud laughter of Beauchamp and Greystoke soon subsided to grim smiles, and presently they looked on with startled faces in which fear and 

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