The pretty maid had opened the door.  Lieutenant Feraud brushed past her brusquely and she raised her scared, questioning eyes to Lieutenant D’Hubert, who could do nothing but shrug his shoulders slightly as he followed with marked reluctance.

In his room Lieutenant Feraud unhooked the clasp, flung his new dolman on the bed, and folding his arms across his chest, turned to the other hussar.

“Do you imagine I am a man to submit tamely to injustice?” he inquired in a boisterous voice.

“Oh, do be reasonable,” remonstrated Lieutenant D’Hubert.

“I am reasonable.  I am perfectly reasonable,” retorted the other, ominously lowering his voice.  “I can’t call the general to account for his behaviour, but you are going to answer to me for yours.”

“I can’t listen to this nonsense,” murmured Lieutenant D’Hubert, making a slightly contemptuous grimace.

“You call that nonsense.  It seems to me perfectly clear.  Unless you don’t understand French.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean,” screamed suddenly Lieutenant Feraud, “to cut off your ears to teach you not to disturb me, orders or no orders, when I am talking to a lady.”

A profound silence followed this mad declaration—­and through the open window Lieutenant D’Hubert heard the little birds singing sanely in the garden.  He said coldly: 

“Why!  If you take that tone, of course I will hold myself at your disposal whenever you are at liberty to attend to this affair.  But I don’t think you will cut off my ears.”

“I am going to attend to it at once,” declared Lieutenant Feraud, with extreme truculence.  “If you are thinking of displaying your airs and graces to-night in Madame de Lionne’s salon you are very much mistaken.”

“Really,” said Lieutenant D’Hubert, who was beginning to feel irritated, “you are an impracticable sort of fellow.  The general’s orders to me were to put you under arrest, not to carve you into small pieces.  Good-morning.”  Turning his back on the little Gascon who, always sober in his potations, was as though born intoxicated, with the sunshine of his wine-ripening country, the northman, who could drink hard on occasion, but was born sober under the watery skies of Picardy, made calmly for the door.  Hearing, however, the unmistakable sound, behind his back, of a sword drawn from the scabbard, he had no option but to stop.

“Devil take this mad Southerner,” he thought, spinning round and surveying with composure the warlike posture of Lieutenant Feraud with the unsheathed sword in his hand.

“At once.  At once,” stuttered Feraud, beside himself.

“You had my answer,” said the other, keeping his temper very well.

At first he had been only vexed and somewhat amused.  But now his face got clouded.  He was asking himself seriously how he could manage to get away.  Obviously it was impossible to run from a man with a sword, and as to fighting him, it seemed completely out of the question.