So that was why he had instinctively suspected something wrong and avoided the obvious line of approach!

“You might have known, too,” I retorted, “that an authority on squirrels can spot the difference between the French and English varieties.”

That, I could see, at last disturbed him. The purchase of the squirrels which he had let loose in the Wen Acre Plantation was just the sort of evidence which police could trace.

“Do you understand now, Savarin,” I asked, “that if you force me to shoot I can plead self-defense?”

He understood all right, but he was beyond caring. This was the tiger I predicted, who would still come on even if a bullet had raked his body.

“I should be sorry not to be present at your trial,” he answered with a calm which was no less deadly for being artificial. “I am half English and was educated here. I know the English criminal law. No one will believe you, von Dennim, and my friends are influential enough to see that you are tried for murder. There will be several weeks — separated by a period in jail — while your past comes out. It will interest the charming girl to whom you were properly saying good-by. I should think you will have to change your name. A von Dennim in the Gestapo! The head of your distinguished family should kill you if I do not.”

“I am the Graf von Dennim,” I answered.

He jerked forward his body and spat in my face.

From that point on it was another person who took command. I neither approve nor disapprove of him. What he did is what I should do again in similar circumstances. But my normally quiet self recognizes him with difficulty.

I shook with self-control and heard myself saying:

“I have a right to know with whom I must deal. Your identity matters no longer.”

“The Vicomte de Saint Sabas.”

I knew the name — and on one point more intimately than the historians who watch down the centuries the inevitable and unruly appearance of a St. Sabas whenever the nobles of France are trumpeting defiance to the King of England or their own.

“You have a son?” I asked.

“I have.”

“My conscience is easier.”

“You are impertinent!”

“No, sir. The first St. Sabas was a steward of the Dennims and ennobled by us. So I did not wish to end the family. I cannot help the disgrace.”

“Disgrace?”

The word stung him a lot more than my medieval absurdity — which, anyway, he knew to be true. I explained it.

“You murdered an innocent postman, St. Sabas. Was that an execution too? Chicago style?”

“An accident!” he exploded. “How the devil could I foresee it?”

His right arm began to move. Slightly quicker the barrel of the Mauser was over the edge of the table. Both weapons returned to the lap.

I told him the true story of my war. It was fair that the man should be given a chance to believe. But the facts seemed to make no impression at all on those impatient and contemptuous eyes. How could they? If he had accepted them, he would have had to face his own guilt.

“My reply to that is that you are a liar and a coward,” he said. “Not even Dickfuss thought of claiming to be a British agent.”

I finished my drink and disregarded the minor insult. I remarked — though, as I say, it wasn’t a self I knew which was speaking — that it was difficult to arrange conditions between a liar and a madman, but that I would make a suggestion.

I was well aware of the suicidal folly of what this damned Graf von Dennim was about to propose. But I could see no other way out. I refused to kill St. Sabas in cold blood. And if I made the slightest move from that table towards the back door of the pub or towards Nur Jehan, St. Sabas would kill me. At least our ancestors could get us out of the stalemate when nothing else could.

“I give you no conditions,” he said.

“Then you may accept mine. You know the barn in its clump of trees. We will ride towards it together but out of pistol shot. We will halt three hundred yards from it.

“I shall stay where I am, giving you time to examine the barn thoroughly since I know it and you do not.

You will then retire to a distance of three hundred yards on the other side. We shall still be in sight of each other and can know if the terms are observed.”

“How do I know you will not ride off and hide in a police station?”

“How do I know you won’t vanish? Savarin has a lot of practice in changing his name and appearance.”

“You know it because I intend to kill you. I am impatient, von Dennim.”

His voice rose a little above its usual cold tone. He was savagely impatient.

That was my motive, too, I said. I did not intend to spend the rest of my life examining my food and parcels.

He still refused to accept. He had no fear of dying, only of dying before he could kill. I knew that, but I accused him of being afraid. He was quite unmoved.

“Yes,” he said. “I am afraid you will run.”

This was getting beyond endurance. I felt an appalling nervous desire to laugh. The Graf von Dennim and the zoologist were each finding the other ridiculous, with the result that both were near hysteria.

“You spat in my face,” I said. “Shall I put it this way for you? That even if a von Dennim is a Gestapo officer and a St. Sabas murders postmen, each has a tradition in spite of it.”

He looked at me with less assurance, or at any rate with less intensity of hatred. He was human again — the deliberate, discriminating judge of what his victim was likely to do.

“You are different from the rest,” he said. “I will agree to your conditions.”

I stood up with my back to the windows of the inn and slipped the Mauser into its holster. St. Sabas wavered, and I had a clear view of his weapon. It was a .45 automatic. The Dennim family held his eyes contemptuously for me while the familiar self disapproved in abject panic of this highly dangerous theater. He put on the safety catch and dropped the pistol into his outside pocket.

We walked side by side to our horses without a word. The atmosphere of formality seemed to be working. The few horsy villagers who watched us must, I am sure, have assumed that the two beautifully mounted middle-aged men were old friends who chose to be silent.

When we were alone and back on the green road which led to the hilltop, we separated. Each kept close to the fence on his own side with twenty yards of turf and ruts between the horses. Nur Jehan strongly objected.

“There is no reason to fight your horse,” St. Sabas said. “What little beauty is in this world has already suffered enough from you. I will give you my word of honor that you may safely ride by my side, and I will accept yours.”

I thanked him, and added:

“The light is going fast.”

“It was too clear this evening. It looks like rain.”

“Not before midnight, I should say.”

“It has certainly been a remarkable June.”

“Yes. We have both been fortunate in our weather.”

“It would interest me to know one thing. All along you invited this meeting, von Dennim?”

“I did.”

“No police at all in it?”

There was a limit to confidence. I was not going to tell him that.

“What they are doing you probably know as well as I do, St. Sabas.”

“My French blood tells,” he said with a harsh laugh. “At one moment I am overwhelmed by the cunning of the British. At the next I am certain that all the cunning is invented by myself.”

The hilltop was now bare and dismal under the overcast sky. There was just enough wind to sing faintly in the telephone wires which marched up the hill along with us and ended at the last house. The barn and the wide clump of trees were no longer sinister as they had been in sunlight. Set in the greater loneliness of the uplands, they suggested shelter and a roof.

“I doubt if we shall be able to see each other at six hundred yards,” I said.