“I am!  But sacrebleu! This is an absurd position for a general of the empire to be placed in,” cried General Feraud, in the accents of profound and dismayed conviction.  “It means for me to be sitting all the rest of my life with a loaded pistol in a drawer waiting for your word.  It’s... it’s idiotic.  I shall be an object of... of... derision.”

“Absurd?...  Idiotic?  Do you think so?” queried argumentatively General D’Hubert with sly gravity.  “Perhaps.  But I don’t see how that can be helped.  However, I am not likely to talk at large of this adventure.  Nobody need ever know anything about it.  Just as no one to this day, I believe, knows the origin of our quarrel....  Not a word more,” he added hastily.  “I can’t really discuss this question with a man who, as far as I am concerned, does not exist.”

When the duellists came out into the open, General Feraud walking a little behind and rather with the air of walking in a trance, the two seconds hurried towards them each from his station at the edge of the wood.  General D’Hubert addressed them, speaking loud and distinctly: 

“Messieurs!  I make it a point of declaring to you solemnly in the presence of General Feraud that our difference is at last settled for good.  You may inform all the world of that fact.”

“A reconciliation after all!” they exclaimed together.

“Reconciliation?  Not that exactly.  It is something much more binding.  Is it not so, general?”

General Feraud only lowered his head in sign of assent.  The two veterans looked at each other.  Later in the day when they found themselves alone, out of their moody friend’s earshot, the cuirassier remarked suddenly: 

“Generally speaking, I can see with my one eye as far or even a little farther than most people.  But this beats me.  He won’t say anything.”

“In this affair of honour I understand there has been from first to last always something that no one in the army could quite make out,” declared the chasseur with the imperfect nose.  “In mystery it began, in mystery it went on, and in mystery it is to end apparently....”

General D’Hubert walked home with long, hasty strides, by no means uplifted by a sense of triumph.  He had conquered, but it did not seem to him he had gained very much by his conquest.  The night before he had grudged the risk of his life which appeared to him magnificent, worthy of preservation as an opportunity to win a girl’s love.  He had even moments when by a marvellous illusion this love seemed to him already his and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of devotion.  Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost it special magnificence.  It wore instead a specially alarming aspect as a snare for the exposure of unworthiness.  As to the marvellous illusion of conquered love that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the night which might have been his last on earth, he comprehended now its true nature.  It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit.  Thus to this man sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed of much of its charm simply because it was no longer menaced.