Roland took the rifle from his brother’s shoulder, looked at it knowingly, tried its action, sighted it, tossed it from one hand to the other, and then, giving it back to Edouard, said: “Thank Sir John again. You have a rifle fit for a king’s son. Let’s go and try it.” All three went out to try Sir John’s rifle, leaving Madame de Montrevel as sad as Thetis when she saw Achilles in his woman’s garb draw the sword of Ulysses from its scabbard. A quarter of an hour later, Edouard returned triumphantly. He brought his mother a bit of pasteboard of the circumference of a hat, in which he had put ten bullets out of twelve. The two men had remained behind in the park conversing. Madame de Montrevel listened to Edouard’s slightly boastful account of his prowess. Then she looked at him with that deep and holy sorrow of mothers to whom fame is no compensation for the blood it sheds. Oh! ungrateful indeed is the child who has seen that look bent upon him and does not eternally remember it. Then, after a few seconds of this painful contemplation, she pressed her second son to her breast, and murmured sobbing: “You, too! you, too, will desert your mother some day.” “Yes, mother,” replied the boy, “to become a general like my father, or an aide-de-camp like Roland.” “And to be killed as your father was, as your brother perhaps will be.” For the strange transformation in Roland’s character had not escaped Madame de Montrevel. It was but an added dread to her other anxieties, among which Amélie’s pallor and abstraction must be numbered. Amélie was just seventeen; her childhood had been that of a happy laughing girl, joyous and healthy. The death of her father had cast a black veil over her youth and gayety. But these tempests of spring pass rapidly. Her smile, the sunshine of life’s dawn, returned like that of Nature, sparkling through that dew of the heart we call tears. Then, one day about six months before this story opens, Amélie’s face had saddened, her cheeks had grown pale, and, like the birds who migrate at the approach of wintry weather, the childlike laughter that escaped her parted lips and white teeth had fled never to return. Madame de Montrevel had questioned her, but Amélie asserted that she was still the same. She endeavored to smile, but as a stone thrown into a lake rings upon the surface, so the smiles roused by this maternal solicitude faded, little by little, from Amélie’s face. With keen maternal instinct Madame de Montrevel had thought of love. But whom could Amélie love? There were no visitors at the Château des Noires-Fontaines, the political troubles had put an end to all society, and Amélie went nowhere alone. Madame de Montrevel could get no further than conjecture. Roland’s return had given her a moment’s hope; but this hope fled as soon as she perceived the effect which this event had produced upon Amélie.