"I am amusing myself with absurd scruples," he said to himself twenty-four hours later. It was afternoon. He was riding along the Meuse. He had received a despatch from the marquis to the effect that Jaubourg's funeral would take place on the following Friday at nine o'clock, and he had answered, by telegraph, that he could not be there. He had understood what the selection of that early hour in the morning meant, as well as a note in the newspapers stating that the deceased had desired a very simple ceremony, without invitations, and without flowers or wreaths. This insistence upon effacement after death avoided comments upon M. de Claviers-Grandchamp's presence behind the bier of his wife's lover. Therein Landri saw a new proof of the ominous secret. He would have been no less irritated by a showy funeral. His irritation manifested itself in a recurrence of the blind and almost savage revolt of the first moments. This feeling imparted its sombre hue to his renewed reflections on the possibility of his responsible participation in one of the inventories--the sole object, as Madame Despois had said, of the silent meditations of all the officers of the garrison. Three of his comrades, who were as sure of him as he was of them, had spoken to him about it in confidence that morning. He had evaded a reply, and he reproached himself bitterly for it. "Yes, absurd! With respect to _him_"--he was still unable to name M. de Claviers in his heart, as he was to name the other elsewhere,--"with respect to him, I cannot have any duty. The mere fact that I am breathing is an insult so dishonoring to him that I can never add anything to it. All that I can do is to avoid contact between us. He will follow the body to-morrow. I shall not be there. Nobody shall see us walking side by side. Hereafter it must be so in life. My impulse yesterday was the best, the wisest one. Yes, if I am ordered to take part in the expedition to Hugueville or Montmartin, so much the better! If I have to break into one of those two churches, so much the better! That will be irreparable. The name of Claviers-Grandchamp will be dishonored because a soldier has made every other sentiment yield to discipline. That theory can be supported, too. A proof of it is that Despois hesitated, and he's a professed Christian. Even Valentine, who is very religious, but who knows what our profession is, accepts the idea!--He will condemn me. But he won't be able to despise me, in his heart. And it will be all over, all over, all over! He will suffer, suffer terribly. And shall I not suffer when I no longer have him to call 'father,' when I can no longer live with him in that heart-to-heart intimacy which was complete,--I realize it now!--despite the differences in our ideas! I understand them now, those differences which used to surprise me--they were Race. He is right. There is such a thing as Race. I hadn't the instincts of a true noble. Nor have I those of a true bourgeois, either.