"My poor, poor friend!" said the young woman, enveloping the officer in a glance eloquent with the affection which she had sworn so often to conceal from him; "so you, too, are going to be forced to leave the army, of which you are so fond, and in which so fine a place is in store for you--" "I shall not leave it," he interrupted; and his face was, as it were, frozen in an expression so stern that Valentine was amazed by it. "What do you mean?" she asked. "That I have questioned myself closely, and have not found in my conscience what my comrades of whom you speak have found in theirs. They were believers, and I--you know too well that I have doubts which I do not parade. I shall have to execute certain orders with repugnance. But repugnance is not scruple. I shall go ahead. I shall not leave the army." "Even if it is necessary to order your men to break down the door of a church?" "I shall give them that order." "You!" she cried. "You--" "Finish your sentence," he rejoined with a still more gloomy expression. "'You, a Claviers-Grandchamp!' You dare not say the word. You think it, you have it on the end of your lips. In another than myself, you would consider it perfectly natural--you above all, who know our profession--that he should execute, in my frame of mind, a military order, and that he should see, in the taking possession of the church of Hugueville or Montmartin, simply a matter of duty to be done. In me you do not admit it. Why? Again, because of my name! And you are surprised that I break out in explosions like that of a moment ago against a servitude of which I alone know the weight!--Oh, well!" he continued, with increasing wrath, "it is precisely because I am a Claviers-Grandchamp that I don't propose to leave the army. I propose to do my duty. You hear, _to do my duty_, not to be a useless idler, a rich man with a most authentic coat-of-arms on his carriages. I do not propose, for the purpose of handing down an example for which I am not responsible, to undo the work of my whole youth, to become an 'Émigré' within the country, like so many of my kinsmen, so many of my friends,--like my father!" "You are not going to deny him, him too!" she implored. "You loved him, you admired him so much!"