The colonel stopped short.  The reputation of Lieutenant D’Hubert for good sense and good temper weighed in the balance.  A cool head, a warm heart, open as the day.  Always correct in his behaviour.  One had to trust him.  The colonel repressed manfully an immense curiosity.

“H’m!  You affirm that as a man and an officer....  No option?  Eh?”

“As an officer, an officer of the Fourth Hussars, too,” repeated Lieutenant D’Hubert, “I had not.  And that is the bottom of the affair, colonel.”

“Yes.  But still I don’t see why to one’s colonel...  A colonel is a father—­que diable.”

Lieutenant D’Hubert ought not to have been allowed out as yet.  He was becoming aware of his physical insufficiency with humiliation and despair—­but the morbid obstinacy of an invalid possessed him—­and at the same time he felt, with dismay, his eyes filling with water.  This trouble seemed too big to handle.  A tear fell down the thin, pale cheek of Lieutenant D’Hubert.  The colonel turned his back on him hastily.  You could have heard a pin drop.

“This is some silly woman story—­is it not?”

The chief spun round to seize the truth, which is not a beautiful shape living in a well but a shy bird best caught by stratagem.  This was the last move of the colonel’s diplomacy, and he saw the truth shining unmistakably in the gesture of Lieutenant D’Hubert, raising his weak arms and his eyes to heaven in supreme protest.

“Not a woman affair—­eh?” growled the colonel, staring hard.  “I don’t ask you who or where.  All I want to know is whether there is a woman in it?”

Lieutenant D’Hubert’s arms dropped and his weak voice was pathetically broken.

“Nothing of the kind, mon colonel.”

“On your honour?” insisted the old warrior.

“On my honour.”

“Very well,” said the colonel thoughtfully, and bit his lip.  The arguments of Lieutenant D’Hubert, helped by his liking for the person, had convinced him.  Yet it was highly improper that his intervention, of which he had made no secret, should produce no visible effect.  He kept Lieutenant D’Hubert a little longer and dismissed him kindly.

“Take a few days more in bed, lieutenant.  What the devil does the surgeon mean by reporting you fit for duty?”

On coming out of the colonel’s quarters, Lieutenant D’Hubert said nothing to the friend who was waiting outside to take him home.  He said nothing to anybody.  Lieutenant D’Hubert made no confidences.  But in the evening of that day the colonel, strolling under the elms growing near his quarters in the company of his second in command opened his lips.

“I’ve got to the bottom of this affair,” he remarked.

The lieutenant-colonel, a dry brown chip of a man with short side-whiskers, pricked up his ears without letting a sound of curiosity escape him.

“It’s no trifle,” added the colonel oracularly.  The other waited for a long while before he murmured: