with a long pale face resembling the countenance of a sheep, opined, shaking his head, that it was a quarrel of long standing envenomed by time.  It was objected to him that the men themselves were too young for such a theory to fit their proceedings.  They belonged also to different and distant parts of France.  A subcommissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor in keysermere breeches, Hessian boots and a blue coat embroidered with silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.  The feud was in the forgotten past.  It might have been something quite inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls remembered the animosity and manifested an instinctive antagonism.  He developed his theme jocularly.  Yet the affair was so absurd from the worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential point of view, that this weird explanation seemed rather more reasonable than any other.

The two officers had confided nothing definite to any one.  Resentment, humiliation at having been worsted arms in hand, and an uneasy feeling of having been involved into a scrape by the injustice of fate, kept Lieutenant Feraud savagely dumb.  He mistrusted the sympathy of mankind.  That would of course go to that dandified staff officer.  Lying in bed he raved to himself in his mind or aloud to the pretty maid who ministered to his needs with devotion and listened to his horrible imprecations with alarm.  That Lieutenant D’Hubert should be made to “pay for it,” whatever it was, seemed to her just and natural.  Her principal concern was that Lieutenant Feraud should not excite himself.  He appeared so wholly admirable and fascinating to the humility of her heart that her only concern was to see him get well quickly even if it were only to resume his visits to Madame de Lionne’s salon.

Lieutenant D’Hubert kept silent for the immediate reason that there was no one except a stupid young soldier servant to speak to.  But he was not anxious for the opportunities of which his severe arrest deprived him.  He would have been uncommunicative from dread of ridicule.  He was aware that the episode, so grave professionally, had its comic side.  When reflecting upon it he still felt that he would like to wring Lieutenant Feraud’s neck for him.  But this formula was figurative rather than precise, and expressed more a state of mind than an actual physical impulse.  At the same time there was in that young man a feeling of comradeship and kindness which made him unwilling to make the position of Lieutenant Feraud worse than it was.

He did not want to talk at large about this wretched affair.  At the inquiry he would have, of course, to speak the truth in self-defence.  This prospect vexed him.

But no inquiry took place.  The army took the field instead.  Lieutenant D’Hubert, liberated without remark, returned to his regimental duties, and Lieutenant Feraud, his arm still in a sling, rode unquestioned with his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields and the fresh air of night bivouacs.  This bracing treatment suited his case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he could turn without misgivings to the prosecution of his private warfare.