“Indeed, sir!”

“No trifle,” repeated the colonel, looking straight before him.  “I’ve, however, forbidden D’Hubert either to send to or receive a challenge from Feraud for the next twelve months.”

He had imagined this prohibition to save the prestige a colonel should have.  The result of it was to give an official seal to the mystery surrounding this deadly quarrel.  Lieutenant D’Hubert repelled by an impassive silence all attempts to worm the truth out of him.  Lieutenant Feraud, secretly uneasy at first, regained his assurance as time went on.  He disguised his ignorance of the meaning of the imposed truce by little sardonic laughs as though he were amused by what he intended to keep to himself.  “But what will you do?” his chums used to ask him.  He contented himself by replying, “Qui vivra verra,” with a truculent air.  And everybody admired his discretion.

Before the end of the truce, Lieutenant D’Hubert got his promotion.  It was well earned, but somehow no one seemed to expect the event.  When Lieutenant Feraud heard of it at a gathering of officers, he muttered through his teeth, “Is that so?” Unhooking his sword from a peg near the door, he buckled it on carefully and left the company without another word.  He walked home with measured steps, struck a light with his flint and steel, and lit his tallow candle.  Then, snatching an unlucky glass tumbler off the mantelpiece, he dashed it violently on the floor.

Now that D’Hubert was an officer of a rank superior to his own, there could be no question of a duel.  Neither could send nor receive a challenge without rendering himself amenable to a court-martial.  It was not to be thought of.  Lieutenant Feraud, who for many days now had experienced no real desire to meet Lieutenant D’Hubert arms in hand, chafed at the systematic injustice of fate.  “Does he think he will escape me in that way?” he thought indignantly.  He saw in it an intrigue, a conspiracy, a cowardly manoeuvre.  That colonel knew what he was doing.  He had hastened to recommend his pet for promotion.  It was outrageous that a man should be able to avoid the consequences of his acts in such a dark and tortuous manner.

Of a happy-go-lucky disposition, of a temperament more pugnacious than military, Lieutenant Feraud had been content to give and receive blows for sheer love of armed strife and without much thought of advancement.  But after this disgusting experience an urgent desire of promotion sprang up in his breast.  This fighter by vocation resolved in his mind to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion of his chiefs like a mere worldling.  He knew he was as brave as any one and never doubted his personal charm.  It would be easy, he thought.  Nevertheless, neither the bravery nor the charm seemed to work very swiftly.  Lieutenant Feraud’s engaging, careless truculence of a “beau sabreur” underwent a change.  He began to make bitter allusions to “clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on.”  The army was full of them, he would say, you had only to look round.  And all the time he had in view one person only, his adversary D’Hubert.  Once he confided to an appreciative friend:  “You see I don’t know how to fawn on the right sort of people.  It isn’t in me.”