"Yes," replied the younger man curtly, "I'll go to-morrow." "As you are now?" "As I am now." Again the invalid laughed, but the laughter was choked in a spasm of coughing. Without another word Ronnay de Maurel rose and readjusted the pillows behind the sick man's head. Gaston was still chuckling inwardly to himself; his dim eyes, feebly glittering now with a glance of mockery, wandered restlessly over the massive and uncouth figure of this soldier of Napoleon. Ronnay de Maurel--General of Division in the most marvellous army the world has ever known--looked at this moment very like an overgrown, over-developed product of industrial Normandy. Ungainly in his movements, with that dragging gait which always appeared more accentuated whenever he laboured under fatigue or excitement, untutored of speech, unversed in every one of the gentle arts which mark the preux chevalier, or the squire of dames, Ronnay was not like to find favour in his mother's eyes. His linen blouse was stained with the grime and smoke of his foundries, his hair was wont to rebel against the conventional tie at the nape of the neck, his hands were rough, his nails unpolished. How the fine, if impecunious, entourage of Mme. la Marquise de Mortain would sneer at this handiwork of democratic France! Ronnay felt the invalid's mocking glance, but he was far too indifferent to all that it implied even to wince under it. "I may put on a clean blouse," he said, with a smile which suddenly lit up his face like sunshine after a storm. Gaston de Maurel gave a curious little sigh, and--if the whole countryside had not known him for a hard, unemotional man--one might almost have said that a look of tenderness had suddenly crept into his sunken eyes as their glance embraced the ungainly figure of his nephew. Ronnay was so singularly unfitted to cope with the difficulties which were about to beset him. He was so little versed in the arts and graces wherewith his mother of a certainty had already set out to cajole him. His untrained mind was not up to the intrigues which were as the breath of life to these aristocratic ladies, who had thrown themselves into the whirlpool of their tottering cause. Ronnay was just a soldier--untaught, unenlightened. Since the age of fifteen he had known no life save that of camps, learned no lessons save those taught on battlefields and in the face of the enemy. He had learned neither self-control nor dissimulation. His untamed spirit would rebel against all the pin-pricks which his mother and her associates would know so well how to deal him. Poor Ronnay! The invalid sighed again, this time somewhat less bitterly. The smile which still lingered round his nephew's rugged face had told him much. It told him that out of the maelstrom of a checkered and turbulent life Ronnay had rescued one priceless gift which had remained his own--a subtle sense of humour, which mayhap would cause him to suffer many things less acutely than he otherwise would have done.