But Eugène was in no mood for light conversation. For sole reply, he paid his score, and then drank the milk slowly, looking out toward the lower lake, across the wide stretch of fresh grass mottled with flecks of sunlight sifted through the foliage above. At his side Vivandière nuzzled the turf along the border of the graveled terrasse, the lithe muscles rippling in her polished neck, and her deep eye shifting now and again in its socket as she looked doubtfully, almost pleadingly, toward her master. They were well known on the Allée and the bridle-path of the avenue du Bois, these two,--the young chasseur, tall, clean-cut, and slender, with a complexion like a girl's, and the gayety of Polichinelle himself, in full red breeches and tunic of black and light blue; and the chestnut mare, nervous and alert, with her racing lines, and her long, leisurely gallop, superb in its suggestion of reserve speed and unflagging endurance. The fates were kind to Lieutenant Eugène Drouin. Paris, spring, youth, an ample fortune, a commission in the _chasseurs_, good looks, a thoroughbred Arab, and a half dozen women frankly in love with him,--surely there was nothing lacking; and yet he knew that something was lacking, though he could not have said what, as he sat sprawling in his little iron chair at the Pré Catalan that morning. He straightened himself suddenly, as she came up the driveway from the left, and then rose with a stiff salute, for, a pace or so behind, walked Vieux César, so-called by an irreverent garrison, leading two horses, one limping badly. Eugène had seen him but once, at the review of the Quatorze Juillet, but, though he was not in uniform now, the fierce gray mustache and keen black eyes of General Tournadour were too familiar to Parisians to pass unrecognized in a throng, much less under circumstances such as these. When one has been Military Governor of Paris, and held the portfolio of war, one does not achieve _incognito_ merely by donning a black civile. So Eugène saluted the general--but with his eyes on the girl.