These two were boys under twenty.

'Shall it be the first hit for Captain Weisspriess?' Count Medole said
this while handing a fresh and fairly-buttoned foil to Ammiani.

Romara laughed: 'You will require to fence the round of Milan city, my
dear count, to win a claim to Captain Weisspriess. In the first place,
I yield him to no man who does not show himself a better man than I.
It's the point upon which I don't pay compliments.'

Count Medole bowed.

'But, if you want occupation,' added Luciano, closing his speech with a
merely interrogative tone.

'I scarcely want that, as those who know me will tell you,' said Medole,
so humbly, that those who knew him felt that he had risen to his high
seat of intellectual contempt. He could indulge himself, having shown
his courage.

'Certainly not; if you are devising means of subsistence for the widows
and orphans of the men who will straggle out to be slaughtered to-night,'
said Luciano; 'you have occupation in that case.'

'I will do my best to provide for them,'--the count persisted in his air
of humility, 'though it is a question with some whether idiots should
live.' He paused effectively, and sucked in a soft smile of self-
approbation at the stroke. Then he pursued: 'We meet the day after
to-morrow. The Pope's Mouth is closed. We meet here at nine in the
morning. The next day at eleven at Farugino's, the barber's, in Monza.