The young girl opened her mouth to continue, then listened, became a little pale, and turned completely towards the door, while her mother turned only half-round in the same direction. Some one was coming upstairs. Wilhelm von Farnow, preceded by the caretaker, who accompanied him only as far as the landing, saw Madame Oberlé through the opening of the door, and as if on a military parade, he drew himself up and crossed the room quickly, and bowed his haughty head first to the mother, then to the young girl. He was extremely well dressed in civilian clothes. His face was drawn and pallid with emotion. He said gravely in French: "I thank you, madame!" Then he looked at Lucienne, and in his unsmiling blue eyes there was a gleam of proud joy. The young girl smiled. Madame Oberlé felt a shudder of aversion, which she tried to repress. She looked straight into the steel-blue eyes of Wilhelm von Farnow, who stood motionless in the same attitude he would have taken under arms and before some great chief. "You must not thank me. I play no part in what is happening. My husband and my daughter have decided everything." He bowed again. "If I were free I should refuse your race, your religion, your army--which are not mine. You see I speak to you frankly. I am determined to tell you that you owe me nothing, but also that I harbour no unjust animosity against you. I even believe that you are a very good soldier and an estimable man. I am so convinced of it that I am going to confide to you an anxiety which tortures me." She hesitated a moment and continued: "We had at Alsheim a terrible scene when Count Kassewitz came to the house." "Count Kassewitz told me about it, madame. He even advised me to give up the idea of marrying your daughter. But I shall not do that. To make me give her up nothing short of----" He began to laugh-- "Nothing short of an order from the Emperor would make me! I am a good German, as you say. I do not easily give up what I have won. And Count Kassewitz is only my uncle." "What you do not know is that my father-in-law, for the first time for many, many years, in his exasperation, in the excess of his grief, has spoken. He cried out to Jean: 'Go away! Go away!' I heard the words. I ran quickly. Well, sir, what moved me most was not seeing M. Philippe Oberlé senseless, stretched upon the floor; it was my son's expression, and it is my conviction that at that moment he resolved to obey and to leave Alsace." "Oh," said Farnow, "that would be bad." He cast a glance at the fair Lucienne, and saw that she was shaking her blond head in sign of denial. "Yes, bad," continued the mother without understanding in what sense Farnow used the word. "What an old age for me in my divided house--without my daughter, whom you are going to take away; without my son, who will have gone away. You are astonished, perhaps, that I should tell you an anxiety of this sort?" He made a gesture which might mean anything.