“I think, captain, I shall have to send to you:  where do you stay in Paris?”

“Nowhere, monsieur; I leave Paris as soon as I can find an easy-going horse.”

“But General Bretaux tells me you are wounded.”

“Not dangerously.”

“Pardon me, captain, but is this prudent? is it just to yourself and your friends?”

“Yes, I owe it to those who perhaps think me dead.”

“You can write to them.”

“I grudge so great, so sacred a joy to a letter.  No! after all I have suffered I claim to be the one to tell her I have kept my word:  I promised to live, and I live.”

“Her? then I say no more, only tell me what road you take.”

“The road to Brittany.”

As the young officer was walking his horse by the roadside about a league and a half from Paris, he heard a clatter behind him, and up galloped an aide-de-camp and drew up alongside, bringing his horse nearly on his haunches.

He handed him a large packet sealed with the arms of France.  The other tore it open; and there was his brevet as colonel.  His cheek flushed and his eye glittered with joy.  The aide-de-camp next gave him a parcel:  “Your epaulets, colonel!  We hear you are going into the wilds where epaulets don’t grow.  You are to join the army of the Rhine as soon as your wound is well.”

“Wherever my country calls me.”

“Your address, then, colonel, that we may know where to put our finger on a tried soldier when we want one.”

“I am going to Beaurepaire.”

“Beaurepaire?  I never heard of it.”

“You never heard of Beaurepaire? it is in Brittany, forty-five leagues from Paris, forty-three leagues and a half from here.”

“Good!  Health and honor to you, colonel.”

“The same to you, lieutenant; or a soldier’s death.”

The new colonel read the precious document across his horse’s mane, and then he was going to put one of the epaulets on his right shoulder, bare at present:  but he reflected.

“No; she should make him a colonel with her own dear hand.  He put them in his pocket.  He would not even look at them till she had seen them.  Oh, how happy he was not only to come back to her alive, but to come back to her honored.”

His wound smarted, his limbs ached, but no pain past or present could lay hold of his mind.  In his great joy he remembered past suffering and felt present pain—­yet smiled.  Only every now and then he pined for wings to shorten the weary road.

He was walking his horse quietly, drooping a little over his saddle, when another officer well mounted came after him and passed him at a hand gallop with one hasty glance at his uniform, and went tearing on like one riding for his life.

“Don’t I know that face?” said Dujardin.

He cudgelled his memory, and at last he remembered it was the face of an old comrade.  At least it strongly reminded him of one Jean Raynal who had saved his life in the Arno, when they were lieutenants together.