“What friends?” said the astonished General D’Hubert, completely off the track.  “I am staying with my brother-in-law over there.”

“Well, he will do for one,” said the chipped veteran.

“We’re the friends of General Feraud,” interjected the other, who had kept silent till then, only glowering with his one eye at the man who had never loved the Emperor.  That was something to look at.  For even the gold-laced Judases who had sold him to the English, the marshals and princes, had loved him at some time or other.  But this man had never loved the Emperor.  General Feraud had said so distinctly.

General D’Hubert felt an inward blow in his chest.  For an infinitesimal fraction of a second it was as if the spinning of the earth had become perceptible with an awful, slight rustle in the eternal stillness of space.  But this noise of blood in his ears passed off at once.  Involuntarily he murmured, “Feraud!  I had forgotten his existence.”

“He’s existing at present, very uncomfortably, it is true, in the infamous inn of that nest of savages up there,” said the one-eyed cuirassier, drily.  “We arrived in your parts an hour ago on post horses.  He’s awaiting our return with impatience.  There is hurry, you know.  The General has broken the ministerial order to obtain from you the satisfaction he’s entitled to by the laws of honour, and naturally he’s anxious to have it all over before the gendarmerie gets on his scent.”

The other elucidated the idea a little further.  “Get back on the quiet—­you understand?  Phitt!  No one the wiser.  We have broken out, too.  Your friend the king would be glad to cut off our scurvy pittances at the first chance.  It’s a risk.  But honour before everything.”

General D’Hubert had recovered his powers of speech.  “So you come here like this along the road to invite me to a throat-cutting match with that—­that . . .”  A laughing sort of rage took possession of him.  “Ha! ha! ha! ha!”

His fists on his hips, he roared without restraint, while they stood before him lank and straight, as though they had been shot up with a snap through a trap door in the ground.  Only four-and-twenty months ago the masters of Europe, they had already the air of antique ghosts, they seemed less substantial in their faded coats than their own narrow shadows falling so black across the white road:  the military and grotesque shadows of twenty years of war and conquests.  They had an outlandish appearance of two imperturbable bonzes of the religion of the sword.  And General D’Hubert, also one of the ex-masters of Europe, laughed at these serious phantoms standing in his way.

Said one, indicating the laughing General with a jerk of the head:  “A merry companion, that.”

“There are some of us that haven’t smiled from the day The Other went away,” remarked his comrade.

A violent impulse to set upon and beat those unsubstantial wraiths to the ground frightened General D’Hubert.  He ceased laughing suddenly.  His desire now was to get rid of them, to get them away from his sight quickly before he lost control of himself.  He wondered at the fury he felt rising in his breast.  But he had no time to look into that peculiarity just then.