General Feraud snapped-to his teeth, and his face assumed an irate, undaunted expression.  “Go on!” he said, grimly.

These would have been his last words if General D’Hubert had been holding the pistols in his hands.  But the pistols were lying on the ground at the foot of a pine.  General D’Hubert had the second of 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!—­utterly defeated, crushed, done for!

He picked up the weapons mechanically, and, instead of firing them into General Feraud’s breast, he gave expression to the thoughts uppermost in his mind, “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 cold-blooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared out, suddenly, out of an impassive face held erect on a rigidly still body.

General D’Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully.  This proceeding was observed with mixed feelings by the other general.  “You missed me twice,” the victor said, 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, gloomily.

“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 by a show of generosity this unreasonable being—­a fellow-soldier of the Grande Armee, a companion in the wonders and terrors of the great military epic.  “You don’t set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do with what’s 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 till I say the word.”

“I am!  But, sacrebleu!  This is an absurd position for a General of the Empire to be placed in!” cried General Feraud, in accents of profound and dismayed conviction.  “It amounts to 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 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.”