Weiss, on the eve of the commencement of hostilities, had found that there were family matters that made it necessary for him to visit Mulhausen, and had made a hurried trip to that city.  That he had been able to employ the good offices of Colonel de Vineuil to afford him an opportunity of shaking hands with his brother-in-law was owing to the circumstance that that officer was own uncle to young Mme. Delaherche, a pretty young widow whom the cloth manufacturer had married the year previous, and whom Maurice and Henriette, thanks to their being neighbors, had known as a girl.  In addition to the colonel, moreover, Maurice had discovered that the captain of his company, Beaudoin, was an acquaintance of Gilberte, Delaherche’s young wife; report even had it that she and the captain had been on terms of intimacy in the days when she was Mme. Maginot, living at Meziere, wife of M. Maginot, the timber inspector.

“Give Henriette a good kiss for me, Weiss,” said the young man, who loved his sister passionately.  “Tell her that she shall have no reason to complain of me, that I wish her to be proud of her brother.”

Tears rose to his eyes at the remembrance of his misdeeds.  The brother-in-law, who was also deeply affected, ended the painful scene by turning to Honore Fouchard, the artilleryman.

“The first time I am anywhere in the neighborhood,” he said, “I will run up to Remilly and tell Uncle Fouchard that I saw you and that you are well.”

Uncle Fouchard, a peasant, who owned a bit of land and plied the trade of itinerant butcher, serving his customers from a cart, was a brother of Henriette’s and Maurice’s mother.  He lived at Remilly, in a house perched upon a high hill, about four miles from Sedan.

“Good!” Honore calmly answered; “the father don’t worry his head a great deal on my account, but go there all the same if you feel inclined.”

At that moment there was a movement over in the direction of the farmhouse, and they beheld the straggler, the man who had been arrested as a spy, come forth, free, accompanied only by a single officer.  He had likely had papers to show, or had trumped up a story of some kind, for they were simply expelling him from the camp.  In the darkening twilight, and at the distance they were, they could not make him out distinctly, only a big, square-shouldered fellow with a rough shock of reddish hair.  And yet Maurice gave vent to an exclamation of surprise.

“Honore! look there.  If one wouldn’t swear he was the Prussian—­you know, Goliah!”

The name made the artilleryman start as if he had been shot; he strained his blazing eyes to follow the receding shape.  Goliah Steinberg, the journeyman butcher, the man who had set him and his father by the ears, who had stolen from him his Silvine; the whole base, dirty, miserable story, from which he had not yet ceased to suffer!  He would have run after, would have caught him by the throat and strangled him, but the man had already crossed the line of stacked muskets, was moving off and vanishing in the darkness.