"_That_ is very brilliant," he said of M. Paul de Nerague, the young lieutenant of light cavalry; "but it is not solid, like Gustave. Your son is honest, candid--a brave heart. It is for that I would have given him Madelon. But it is Providence which disposes of us, as our good father St. Velours tells us often; and one must be content. Young Nerague pleases my daughter, and I must swallow him, though for me he smells too strong of the barracks: _ca flaire la caserne, mon ami_." That odour of the barracks which distinguished the sub-lieutenant Paul de Nerague became more odious after his marriage with the virtuous Madelon, when he was established--_niche_, as he himself called it--in very comfortable, though somewhat gruesome, apartments at Cotenoir. His riotous deportment, his hospitable disposition (as displayed in the frequent entertainment of his brothers-in-arms at the expense of his father-in-law), his Don Juan-like demeanour in relation to the housemaids and kitchen-wenches of the chateau--innocent enough in the main, but on that account so much the more audacious--struck terror to the hearts of Madame Frehlter and her daughter; and the elder lady was much gratified by that thirst for foreign territory which carried the greater part of the French army and the regiment of the vivacious Paul to the distant wilds of Algeria. The virtuous Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant de Nerague. The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise returned from Rouen with her brother's child. The little boy was sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his aunt's bed (it had been his father's cot thirty years ago) when Francois Lenoble returned from Cotenoir that night. It was not till the next day that he saw the child. He had been making his usual morning's round in the gardens and orchards, when he came into the salon, and saw the little boy seated near his grandmother's chair, playing with some dominoes. Something--perhaps the likeness to his dead son--the boy's black clothes, for Cydalise had contrived to dress him in decent mourning--struck suddenly on the old man's heart. "Who is that boy?" he asked, with a strange earnestness. "Your son Gustave's only child," answered his wife gently,--"his orphan child." Francois Lenoble looked at her, and from her to the boy; tried to speak, but could not; beckoned the child, and then dropped heavily into a chair and sobbed aloud. Until this moment no one had ever seen him shed a tear for the son he had put away from his home--and, as it had seemed, from his heart. Not by one sigh, not by one mournful utterance of the familiar name, had he betrayed the depth of that wound which he had endured, silently, obstinately, in all these years.