'Well,' resumed Weiss, 'those are the Prussians--I've been looking at them ever since the morning, and they pass and pass without cessation. If our soldiers are waiting for them you may be pretty sure that they are making all haste to arrive, and all the townsfolk have seen them the same as I have. It's only our generals who seem to have become blind. A little while ago I was talking to a general who shrugged his shoulders and told me that Marshal MacMahon was positive that he only had some seventy thousand men to deal with. God grant that his information be correct!--But just look at them; look at them, the ground is covered with them and still and ever they swarm and swarm!' At this moment Maurice threw himself back on his bed and burst into loud sobs. Henriette had just entered the room with the same smiling air that she had worn during the morning. But at sight of Maurice she felt alarmed, and hastily approached him. 'What is the matter?' He waved her back, however. 'No, no, leave me, I have never brought you anything but sorrow. When I think that you used to deprive yourself of dresses, and that I was sent to college! Ah! a precious lot of good my education has done me! And then I almost dishonoured our name, and Heaven alone knows where I should be at the present time if you hadn't bled yourself in every vein to repair my folly!' She was again smiling in her peaceful way: 'You certainly haven't woke up in a good humour, my dear fellow,' she replied. 'You know very well that all that is blotted out, forgotten. Aren't you now doing your duty as a Frenchman? I'm quite proud of you since you've enlisted; I assure you I am.' She had turned towards Jean as though to summon him to her assistance. He was gazing at her, somewhat surprised to find that she did not look so pretty as he had thought her in the morning. She seemed slighter and paler now that he no longer saw her with the hallucinatory vision of his weariness. Her likeness to her brother remained very striking, however, although, at this moment, the difference in their natures was made plainly manifest; he, nervous like a woman, stricken with the disease of the period, a prey to the historical, social crisis of the race, capable of rising at one moment to the noblest enthusiasm, and of falling, the next, to the most abject despair; she, so small and slight, as unobtrusive as a Cinderella, with the air of a resigned little housewife, but albeit displaying an undaunted brow and brave eyes--in a word, the stuff that martyrs are made of. 'Proud of me!' Maurice exclaimed. 'Well, there's no reason why you should be proud of me. For a month past we have been flying the enemy like the cowards we are.' 'Well,' said Jean, in his sensible way; 'we are not the only ones--we simply do as we are bidden.'