The father was staring at the rustic grave in dumb amazement.  His son was there, there forever! . . . and he would never see him again!  He imagined him sleeping unshrouded below, in direct contact with the earth, just as Death had surprised him in his miserable and heroic old uniform.  He recalled the exquisite care which the lad had always given his body—­the long bath, the massage, the invigorating exercise of boxing and fencing, the cold shower, the elegant and subtle perfume . . . all that he might come to this! . . . that he might be interred just where he had fallen in his tracks, like a wornout beast of burden!

The bereaved father wished to transfer his son immediately from the official burial fields, but he could not do it yet.  As soon as possible it should be done, and he would erect for him a mausoleum fit for a king. . . .  And what good would that do?  He would merely be changing the location of a mass of bones, but his body, his physical semblance—­all that had contributed to the charm of his personality would be mixed with the earth.  The son of the rich Desnoyers would have become an inseparable part of a poor field in Champagne.  Ah, the pity of it all!  And for this, had he worked so hard and so long to accumulate his millions? . . .

He could never know how Julio’s death had happened.  Nobody could tell him his last words.  He was ignorant as to whether his end had been instantaneous, overwhelming—­his idol going out of the world with his usual gay smile on his lips, or whether he had endured long hours of agony abandoned in the field, writhing like a reptile or passing through phases of hellish torment before collapsing in merciful oblivion.  He was also ignorant of just how much was beneath this mound—­whether an entire body discreetly touched by the hand of Death, or an assemblage of shapeless remnants from the devastating hurricane of steel! . . .  And he would never see him again!  And that Julio who had been filling his thoughts would become simply a memory, a name that would live while his parents lived, fading away, little by little, after they had disappeared! . . .

He was startled to hear a moan, a sob. . . .  Then he recognized dully that they were his own, that he had been accompanying his reflections with groans of grief.

His wife was still at his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . .  There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . .  The father’s sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable depression, without his wrathful exasperation.  And she would never see him again! . . .  Could it be possible! . . .