A few moments before the breakfast-hour at the Chalet, the clacking of a postilion’s whip apprised the family that the two soldiers were arriving; only a father’s joy at returning after long absence could be heralded with such clatter, and it brought all the women to the garden gate.  There is many a father and many a child—­perhaps more fathers than children—­who will understand the delights of such an arrival, and that happy fact shows that literature has no need to depict it.  Perhaps all gentle and tender emotions are beyond the range of literature.

Not a word that could trouble the peace of the family was uttered on this joyful day.  Truce was tacitly established between father, mother, and child as to the so-called mysterious love which had paled Modeste’s cheeks,—­for this was the first day she had left her bed since Dumay’s departure for Paris.  The colonel, with the charming delicacy of a true soldier, never left his wife’s side nor released her hand; but he watched Modeste with delight, and was never weary of noting her refined, elegant, and poetic beauty.  Is it not by such seeming trifles that we recognize a man of feeling?  Modeste, who feared to interrupt the subdued joy of the husband and wife kept at a little distance, coming from time to time to kiss her father’s forehead, and when she kissed it overmuch she seemed to mean that she was kissing it for two,—­for Bettina and herself.

“Oh, my darling, I understand you,” said the colonel, pressing her hand as she assailed him with kisses.

“Hush!” whispered the young girl, glancing at her mother.

Dumay’s rather sly and pregnant silence made Modeste somewhat uneasy as to the upshot of his journey to Paris.  She looked at him furtively every now and then, without being able to get beneath his epidermis.  The colonel, like a prudent father, wanted to study the character of his only daughter, and above all consult his wife, before entering on a conference upon which the happiness of the whole family depended.

“To-morrow, my precious child,” he said as they parted for the night, “get up early, and we will go and take a walk on the seashore.  We have to talk about your poems, Mademoiselle de La Bastie.”

His last words, accompanied by a smile, which reappeared like an echo on Dumay’s lips, were all that gave Modeste any clew to what was coming; but it was enough to calm her uneasiness and keep her awake far into the night with her head full of suppositions; this, however, did not prevent her from being dressed and ready in the morning long before the colonel.

“You know all, my kind papa?” she said as soon as they were on the road to the beach.

“I know all, and a good deal more than you do,” he replied.

After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.

“Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a stranger without consulting her.”