Once again she fancied herself seated by her cottage door:  the sun was setting, and down the small road which led to the house galloped an orderly, a dragoon, covered with dust.  “Are you Madeleine Derblay?” he asked.—­“Yes.”—­He drew from his sack a letter sealed with black.  “Madame,” he said, “your son has died for his country, but he has gained this on the field of battle;” and he handed her the cross of the Legion of Honor.  “Give me back my child!” she had shrieked:  “take away your reward!  Give me back my child!  I won’t sell him for that cross.”

And Henri the while?  His heart was as heavy as that of his parents, for he well knew that the day which doomed him to a seven years’ absence would also condemn him to orphanhood.  His father and mother were too aged by sorrow to be able to abide his return:  they would soon die; and if not, who would be there to tend them, to earn them bread, to find them the comforts which their old arms were unfit to earn by themselves?  These reflections were terrible; and besides, to make his pain more torturing, he was in love.  A young girl of his own age had been destined for him by his parents and by hers, and she was to become his wife at once if—­if—­and ever uppermost to cloud all his prospects came that fatal if—­if he should draw a lucky number at the conscription.  But what if he should not?  How could he ask her to wait for him seven years? or how, indeed, could he expect that her friends would allow her to do so?  They were poor people, as he knew, and it was but natural that they should wish to see their daughter speedily settled.  This thought filled the unhappy boy with despair; and as the twentieth of February, the day appointed for the conscription, approached, he was almost beside himself with anxiety.  For a long while his father and his mother, trusting to their arms and their economy, had lived in the hope of being able to buy him off.  Two thousand three hundred francs were needed to do this, and neither hard work, self-denial nor thrift had been spared to collect the money; but it was a large sum, and notwithstanding all the hard toil of father and son, and all the frugality of the mother, they had not been able in five years’ time to collect more than two-thirds of it.  An accident had then happened to them:  Madeleine, whose love, deep and boundless as Heaven, had pushed her to pinch and stint herself almost to starvation in order to save, had fallen ill under her efforts, and her life had only been saved after a three months’ combat with death, during which doctor’s fees, medicines and little comforts had swallowed up five hundred francs of what had been laid by.  At the beginning of February there were, therefore, nearly fourteen hundred francs wanting to make up the amount needed.