Lieut.  D’Hubert ought not to have been allowed out as yet.  He was becoming aware of his physical insufficiency with humiliation and despair.  But the morbid obstinacy of an invalid possessed him, and at the same time he felt with dismay his eyes filling with water.  This trouble seemed too big to handle.  A tear fell down the thin, pale cheek of Lieut.  D’Hubert.

The colonel turned his back on him hastily.  You could have heard a pin drop.  “This is some silly woman story—­is it not?”

Saying these words the chief spun round to seize the truth, which is not a beautiful shape living in a well, but a shy bird best caught by stratagem.  This was the last move of the colonel’s diplomacy.  He saw the truth shining unmistakably in the gesture of Lieut.  D’Hubert raising his weak arms and his eyes to heaven in supreme protest.

“Not a woman affair—­eh?” growled the colonel, staring hard.  “I don’t ask you who or where.  All I want to know is whether there is a woman in it?”

Lieut.  D’Hubert’s arms dropped, and his weak voice was pathetically broken.

“Nothing of the kind, mon Colonel.”

“On your honour?” insisted the old warrior.

“On my honour.”

“Very well,” said the colonel, thoughtfully, and bit his lip.  The arguments of Lieut.  D’Hubert, helped by his liking for the man, had convinced him.  On the other hand, it was highly improper that his intervention, of which he had made no secret, should produce no visible effect.  He kept Lieut.  D’Hubert a few minutes longer, and dismissed him kindly.

“Take a few days more in bed.  Lieutenant.  What the devil does the surgeon mean by reporting you fit for duty?”

On coming out of the colonel’s quarters, Lieut.  D’Hubert said nothing to the friend who was waiting outside to take him home.  He said nothing to anybody.  Lieut.  D’Hubert made no confidences.  But on the evening of that day the colonel, strolling under the elms growing near his quarters, in the company of his second in command, opened his lips.

“I’ve got to the bottom of this affair,” he remarked.  The lieut.-colonel, a dry, brown chip of a man with short side-whiskers, pricked up his ears at that without letting a sign of curiosity escape him.

“It’s no trifle,” added the colonel, oracularly.  The other waited for a long while before he murmured: 

“Indeed, sir!”

“No trifle,” repeated the colonel, looking straight before him.  “I’ve, however, forbidden D’Hubert either to send to or receive a challenge from Feraud for the next twelve months.”

He had imagined this prohibition to save the prestige a colonel should have.  The result of it was to give an official seal to the mystery surrounding this deadly quarrel.  Lieut.  D’Hubert repelled by an impassive silence all attempts to worm the truth out of him.  Lieut.  Feraud, secretly uneasy at first, regained his assurance as time went on.  He disguised his ignorance of the meaning of the imposed truce by slight sardonic laughs, as though he were amused by what he intended to keep to himself.  “But what will you do?” his chums used to ask him.  He contented himself by replying “Qui vivra verra” with a little truculent air.  And everybody admired his discretion.