"A pretty hornet's nest is this we have lit upon, if ever there was one." Side by side with the count, with a dauntless step and eye, Sir Norman entered, too; and, at sight of him a burst of surprise and fury rang from lip to lip.

There was a yell of "Betrayed, betrayed!" and the dwarf, with a face so distorted by fiendish fury that it was scarcely human, made a frenzied rush at him, when the clear, commanding voice of the count rang like a bugle blast through the assembly, "Sheathe your swords, the whole of you, and yield yourselves prisoners.
In the king's name, I command you to surrender." "There is no king here but I!" screamed the dwarf, gnashing his teeth, and fairly foaming with rage.

"Die; traitor and spy! You have escaped me once, but your hour is come now." "Allow me to differ from you," said Sir Norman, politely, as he evaded the blindly-frantic lunge of the dwarf's sword, and inserted an inch or two of the point of his own in that enraged little prince's anatomy.

"So far from my hour having come--if you will take the trouble to reflect upon it--you will find it is the reverse, and that my little friend's brief and brilliant career is rapidly drawing to a close." At these bland remarks, and at the sharp thrust that accompanied them, the dwarfs previous war-dance of anxiety was nothing to the horn-pipe of exasperation he went through when Sir Norman ceased.

The blood was raining from his side, and from the point of his adversary's sword, as he withdrew it; and, maddened like a wild beast at the sight of his own blood, he screeched, and foamed, and kicked about his stout little legs, and gnashed his teeth, and made grabs at his wig, and lashed the air with his sword, and made such desperate pokes with it, at Sir Norman and everybody else who came in his way, that, for the public good, the young knight run him through the sword-arm, and, in spite of all his distracted didos, captured him by the help of Hubert, and passed him over to the soldiers to cheer and keep company with the duke.
This brisk little affair being over, Sir Norman had time to look about him.