"
"You speak strangely. Cannot your life have a resurrection?"
"Never, madame. For a brief hour you have given it one--in dreams. It
will have no other."
"But surely there may be ways--such a story as you have told me brought
to the Emperor's knowledge, you would see your enemy disgraced, yourself
honored?"
"Possibly, madame. But it is out of the question that it should ever be
so brought. As I am now, so I desire to live and die."
"You voluntarily condemn yourself to this?"
"I have voluntarily chosen it. I am well sure that the silence I entreat
will be kept by you?"
"Assuredly; unless by your wish it be broken. Yet--I await my brother's
arrival here; he is a soldier himself; I shall hope that he will
persuade you to think differently of your future. At any rate, both his
and my own influence will always be exerted for you, if you will avail
yourself of it."
"You do me much honor, madame. All I will ever ask of you is to return
those coins to my Colonel, and to forget that your gentleness has made
me forget, for one merciful half hour, the sufferance on which alone a
trooper can present himself here."
He swept the ground with his kepi as though it were the plumed hat of a
Marshal, and backed slowly from her presence, as he had many a time long
before backed out of a throne-room.
As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chessmen; they stood
under glass, and had not been broken by her lapdog.
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