“So you do not love me well enough to marry me?” she said.

Castanier did not answer; he was absorbed by his thoughts.  The poor girl resigned herself to her fate.  The ex-dragoon was in despair.  Naqui’s heart softened toward him at the sight of his trouble; she tried to soothe him, but what could she do when she did not know what ailed him?  When Naqui made up her mind to know the secret, although she never asked him a question, the cashier dolefully confessed to the existence of a Mme. Castanier.  This lawful wife, a thousand times accursed, was living in a humble way in Strasbourg on a small property there; he wrote to her twice a year, and kept the secret of her existence so well, that no one suspected that he was married.  The reason of this reticence?  If it is familiar to many military men who may chance to be in a like predicament, it is perhaps worth while to give the story.

Your genuine trooper (if it is allowable here to employ the word which in the army signifies a man who is destined to die as a captain) is a sort of serf, a part and parcel of his regiment, an essentially simple creature, and Castanier was marked out by nature as a victim to the wiles of mothers with grown-up daughters left too long on their hands.  It was at Nancy, during one of those brief intervals of repose when the Imperial armies were not on active service abroad, that Castanier was so unlucky as to pay some attention to a young lady with whom he danced at a ridotto, the provincial name for the entertainments often given by the military to the townsfolk, or vice versa, in garrison towns.  A scheme for inveigling the gallant captain into matrimony was immediately set on foot, one of those schemes by which mothers secure accomplices in a human heart by touching all its motive springs, while they convert all their friends into fellow-conspirators.  Like all people possessed by one idea, these ladies press everything into the service of their great project, slowly elaborating their toils, much as the ant-lion excavates its funnel in the sand and lies in wait at the bottom for its victim.  Suppose that no one strays, after all, into that carefully constructed labyrinth?  Suppose that the ant-lion dies of hunger and thirst in her pit?  Such things may be, but if any heedless creature once enters in, it never comes out.  All the wires which could be pulled to induce action on the captain’s part were tried; appeals were made to the secret interested motives that always come into play in such cases; they worked on Castanier’s hopes and on the weaknesses and vanity of human nature.  Unluckily, he had praised the daughter to her mother when he brought her back after a waltz, a little chat followed, and then an invitation in the most natural way in the world.  Once introduced into the house, the dragoon was dazzled by the hospitality of a family who appeared to conceal their real wealth beneath a show of careful economy.  He was skillfully flattered