“Not missed!” he croaked hoarsely from the depths of a dry throat.

This sinister sound loosened the spell which had fallen on General D’Hubert’s senses.

“Yes, missed—­a bout portant” he heard himself saying exultingly almost before he had recovered the full command of his faculties.  The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of a lifetime.  For years General D’Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by an atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by that man’s savage caprice.  Besides, General D’Hubert had been in this last instance too unwilling to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape of a desire to kill.

“And I have my two shots to fire yet,” he added pitilessly.

General Feraud snapped his teeth, and his face assumed an irate, undaunted expression.

“Go on,” he growled.

These would have been his last words on earth if General D’Hubert had been holding the pistols in his hand.  But the pistols were lying on the ground at the foot of a tall pine.  General D’Hubert had the second’s leisure necessary to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man but as a lover, not as a danger but as a rival—­not as a foe to life but as an obstacle to marriage.  And, behold, there was the rival defeated!  Miserably defeated-crushed—­done for!

He picked up the weapons mechanically, and instead of firing them into General Feraud’s breast, gave expression to the thought uppermost in his mind.

“You will fight no more duels now.”

[Illustration:  frontispiece166.jpg “You will fight no more duels now.”]

His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General Feraud’s stoicism.

“Don’t dawdle then, damn you for a coldblooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared out suddenly out of an impassive face held erect on a rigid body.

General D’Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully.  This proceeding was observed with a sort of gloomy astonishment by the other general.

“You missed me twice,” he began coolly, shifting both pistols to one hand.  “The last time within a foot or so.  By every rule of single combat your life belongs to me.  That does not mean that I want to take it now.”

“I have no use for your forbearance,” muttered General Feraud savagely.

“Allow me to point out that this is no concern of mine,” said General D’Hubert, whose every word was dictated by a consummate delicacy of feeling.  In anger, he could have killed that man, but in cold blood, he recoiled from humiliating this unreasonable being—­a fellow soldier of the Grand Armee, his companion in the wonders and terrors of the military epic.  “You don’t set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do with what is my own.”

General Feraud looked startled.  And the other continued: 

“You’ve forced me on a point of honour to keep my life at your disposal, as it were, for fifteen years.  Very well.  Now that the matter is decided to my advantage, I am going to do what I like with your life on the same principle.  You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I choose.  Neither more nor less.  You are on your honour.”