A few stars had come out on the blue obscurity, clear as crystal, of the sky.  The dry, thin voice of the Chevalier spoke harshly.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

The general seized a withered, frail old hand with a strong grip.

“Because I owe you my fullest confidence.  Who could tell Adele but you?  You understand why I dare not trust my brother-in-law nor yet my own sister.  Chevalier!  I have been so near doing these things that I tremble yet.  You don’t know how terrible this duel appears to me.  And there’s no escape from it.”

He murmured after a pause, “It’s a fatality,” dropped the Chevalier’s passive hand, and said in his ordinary conversational voice: 

“I shall have to go without seconds.  If it is my lot to remain on the ground, you at least will know all that can be made known of this affair.”

The shadowy ghost of the ancien regime seemed to have become more bowed during the conversation.

“How am I to keep an indifferent face this evening before those two women?” he groaned.  “General!  I find it very difficult to forgive you.”

General D’Hubert made no answer.

“Is your cause good at least?”

“I am innocent.”

This time he seized the Chevalier’s ghostly arm above the elbow, gave it a mighty squeeze.

“I must kill him,” he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the road.

The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest.  He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of the orangery.  Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other inmates.  He was glad of it.  It seemed to him that if he had to open his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking furniture, smashing china and glasses.  From the moment he opened the private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed dining room.  When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over, and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan on which he let himself fall heavily.  His moral prostration was still greater.  That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion.  It was the revolt of jeopardised desire.  In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared, fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.