His brain, playing double, calculated with lightning swiftness the chances and movements of that whirlwind rush of fight, while at the same time it swept through a retrospect of all the years since Alice came into his life.

How he had watched her grow and bloom; how he had taught her, trained her mind and soul and body to high things, loved her with a fatherly passion unbounded, guarded her from the coarse and lawless influences of her surroundings.

Like the tolling of an infinitely melancholy bell, all this went through his breast and brain, and, blending with a furious current of whatever passions were deadly dangerous in his nature, swept as a storm bearing its awful force into his sword-arm.
The Englishman was a lion, the priest a gladiator.

The stars aloft in the vague, dark, yet splendid, amphitheater were the audience.

It was a question.