They stepped back at this and raised again their hands to their hats with marked ceremoniousness.  Then the one with the chipped nose, speaking for both, remarked that the matter was confidential enough and to be arranged discreetly.  Their general quarters were in that village over there where the infernal clodhoppers—­damn their false royalist hearts—­looked remarkably cross-eyed at three unassuming military men.  For the present he should only ask for the name of General D’Hubert’s friends.

“What friends?” said the astonished General D’Hubert, completely off the track.  “I am staying with my brother-in-law over there.”

“Well, he will do for one,” suggested the chipped veteran.

“We’re the friends of General Feraud,” interjected the other, who had kept silent till then, only glowering with his one eye at the man who had never loved the emperor.  That was something to look at.  For even the gold-laced Judases who had sold him to the English, the marshals and princes, had loved him at some time or other.  But this man had never loved the emperor.  General Feraud had said so distinctly.

General D’Hubert felt a sort of inward blow in his chest.  For an infinitesimal fraction of a second it was as if the spinning of the earth had become perceptible with an awful, slight rustle in the eternal stillness of space.  But that was the noise of the blood in his ears and passed off at once.  Involuntarily he murmured: 

“Feraud!  I had forgotten his existence.”

“He’s existing at present, very uncomfortably it is true, in the infamous inn of that nest of savages up there,” said the one-eyed cuirassier drily.  “We arrived in your parts an hour ago on post horses.  He’s awaiting our return with impatience.  There is hurry, you know.  The general has broken the ministerial order of sojourn to obtain from you the satisfaction he’s entitled to by the laws of honour, and naturally he’s anxious to have it all over before the gendarmerie gets the scent.”

The other elucidated the idea a little further.

“Get back on the quiet—­you understand?  Phitt!  No one the wiser.  We have broken out, too.  Your friend the king would be glad to cut off our scurvy pittances at the first chance.  It’s a risk.  But honour before everything.”

General D’Hubert had recovered his power of speech.

“So you come like this along the road to invite me to a throat-cutting match with that—­that...”  A laughing sort of rage took possession of him.

“Ha! ha! ha! ha!”

His fists on his hips, he roared without restraint while they stood before him lank and straight, as unexpected as though they had been shot up with a snap through a trapdoor in the ground.  Only four-and-twenty months ago the masters of Europe, they had already the air of antique ghosts, they seemed less substantial in their faded coats than their own narrow shadows falling so black across the white road—­the military and grotesque shadows of twenty years of war and conquests.  They had the outlandish appearance of two imperturbable bronzes of the religion of the sword.  And General D’Hubert, also one of the ex-masters of Europe, laughed at these serious phantoms standing in his way.