“A few minutes’ repose, Francois, that is all.  Do not let me be disturbed for an hour.”

“Attention!” cried Francois.  “Colonel wants to sleep.”

The tent was sentinelled, and Dujardin was alone with the past.

Then had the fools, that took (as fools will do) deep sorrow for sullenness, seen the fiery soldier droop, and his wan face fall into haggard lines, and his martial figure shrink, and heard his stout heart sigh!  He took a letter from his bosom:  it was almost worn to pieces.  He had read it a thousand times, yet he read it again.  A part of the sweet sad words ran thus:—­

“We must bow.  We can never be happy together on earth; let us make Heaven our friend.  This is still left us,—­not to blush for our love; to do our duty, and to die.”

“How tender, but how firm,” thought Camille.  “I might agitate, taunt, grieve her I love, but I could not shake her.  No!  God and the saints to my aid! they saved me from a crime I now shudder at.  And they have given me the good chaplain:  he prays with me, he weeps for me.  His prayers still my beating heart.  Yes, poor suffering angel!  I read your will in these tender, but bitter, words:  you prefer duty to love.  And one day you will forget me; not yet awhile, but it will be so.  It wounds me when I think of it, but I must bow.  Your will is sacred.  I must rise to your level, not drag you to mine.”

Then the soldier that had stood between two armies in a hail of bullets, and fired a master-shot, took a little book of offices in one hand,—­the chaplain had given it him,—­and fixed his eyes upon the pious words, and clung like a child to the pious words, and kissed his lost wife’s letter, and tried hard to be like her he loved:  patient, very patient, till the end should come.

“Qui vive?” cried the sentinel outside to a strange officer.

“France,” was his reply.  He then asked the sentinel, “Where is the colonel commanding the brigade?”

The sentinel lowered his voice, “Asleep, my officer,” said he; for the new-comer carried two epaulets.

“Wake him,” said the officer in a tone of a man used to command on a large scale.

Dujardin heard, and did not choose a stranger should think he was asleep in broad day.  He came hastily out of the tent, therefore, with Josephine’s letter in his hand, and, in the very act of conveying it to his bosom, found himself face to face with—­her husband.

Did you ever see two duellists cross rapiers?

How unlike a theatrical duel!  How smooth and quiet the bright blades are! they glide into contact.  They are polished and slippery, yet they hold each other.  So these two men’s eyes met, and fastened:  neither spoke:  each searched the other’s face keenly.  Raynal’s countenance, prepared as he was for this meeting, was like a stern statue’s.  The other’s face flushed, and his heart raged and sickened at sight of the man, that, once his comrade and benefactor, was now possessor of the woman he loved.  But the figures of both stood alike haughty, erect, and immovable, face to face.