“The Napoleonic legend is weaker now,” said he.

“The son of an officer!”

“Grandson.”

“It was his choice to be,—­he gave it up without reluctance?”

“Emile obeyed the command of his parents,” Weyburn answered; and he was obedient to the veiled direction of her remark, in speaking of himself:  “I had a reason, too.”

“One wonders!”

“It would have impoverished my mother’s income to put aside a small allowance for me for years.  She would not have hesitated.  I then set my mind on the profession of schoolmaster.”

“Emile Grenat was a brave boy.  Has he no regrets?”

“Neither of us has a regret.”

“He began ambitiously.”

“It’s the way at the beginning.”

“It is not usually abjured.”

“I’m afraid we neither of us ‘dignify our calling’ by discontent with it!”

A dusky flash, worth seeing, came on her cheeks.  “I respect enthusiasms,” she said; and it was as good to him to hear as the begging pardon, though clearly she could not understand enthusiasm for the schoolmaster’s career.

Light of evidence was before him, that she had a friendly curiosity to know what things had led to their new meeting under these conditions.  He sketched them cursorily; there was little to tell—­little, that is; appealing to a romantic mind for interest.  Aware of it, by sympathy, he degraded the narrative to a flatness about as cheering as a suburban London Sunday’s promenade.  Sympathy caused the perverseness.  He felt her disillusionment; felt with it and spread a feast of it.  She had to hear of studies at Caen and at a Paris Lycee; French fairly mastered; German, the same; Italian, the same; after studies at Heidelberg, Asti, and Florence; between four and five months at Athens (he was needlessly precise), in tutorship with a young nobleman:  no events, nor a spot of colour.  Thus did he wilfully, with pain to himself, put an extinguisher on the youth painted brilliant and eminent in a maiden’s imagination.

“So there can no longer be thought of the army,” she remarked; and the remark had a sort of sigh, though her breathing was equable.

“Unless a big war knocks over all rules and the country comes praying us to serve,” he said.

“You would not refuse then?”

“Not in case of need.  One may imagine a crisis when they would give commissions to men of my age or older for the cavalry—­heavy losses of officers.”

She spoke, as if urged by a sting to revert to the distasteful:  “That profession—­must you not take...enter into orders if you aim at any distinction?”

“And a member of the Anglican Church would not be allowed to exchange his frock for a cavalry sabre,” said he.  “That is true.  I do not propose to settle as a schoolmaster in England.”

“Where?”

“On the Continent.”

“Would not America be better?”

“It would not so well suit the purpose in view for us.”