pushing his chair back, yawned elaborately in sign that he didn’t care anything for presentiments, and throwing himself on the bed went to sleep.  During the night he shivered from time to time without waking up.  In the morning he rode out of town between his two seconds, talking of indifferent things, and looking right and left with apparent detachment into the heavy morning mists shrouding the flat green fields bordered by hedges.  He leaped a ditch, and saw the forms of many mounted men moving in the fog.  “We are to fight before a gallery, it seems,” he muttered to himself, bitterly.

His seconds were rather concerned at the state of the atmosphere, but presently a pale, sickly sun struggled out of the low vapours, and Captain D’Hubert made out, in the distance, three horsemen riding a little apart from the others.  It was Captain Feraud and his seconds.  He drew his sabre, and assured himself that it was properly fastened to his wrist.  And now the seconds, who had been standing in close group with the heads of their horses together, separated at an easy canter, leaving a large, clear field between him and his adversary.  Captain D’Hubert looked at the pale sun, at the dismal fields, and the imbecility of the impending fight filled him with desolation.  From a distant part of the field a stentorian voice shouted commands at proper intervals:  Au pas—­Au trot—­Charrrgez! . . .  Presentiments of death don’t come to a man for nothing, he thought at the very moment he put spurs to his horse.

And therefore he was more than surprised when, at the very first set-to, Captain Feraud laid himself open to a cut over the forehead, which blinding him with blood, ended the combat almost before it had fairly begun.  It was impossible to go on.  Captain D’Hubert, leaving his enemy swearing horribly and reeling in the saddle between his two appalled friends, leaped the ditch again into the road and trotted home with his two seconds, who seemed rather awestruck at the speedy issue of that encounter.  In the evening Captain D’Hubert finished the congratulatory letter on his sister’s marriage.

He finished it late.  It was a long letter.  Captain D’Hubert gave reins to his fancy.  He told his sister that he would feel rather lonely after this great change in her life; but then the day would come for him, too, to get married.  In fact, he was thinking already of the time when there would be no one left to fight with in Europe and the epoch of wars would be over.  “I expect then,” he wrote, “to be within measurable distance of a marshal’s baton, and you will be an experienced married woman.  You shall look out a wife for me.  I will be, probably, bald by then, and a little blase.  I shall require a young girl, pretty of course, and with a large fortune, which should help me to close my glorious career in the splendour befitting my exalted rank.”  He ended with the information that he had just given a lesson to a worrying, quarrelsome fellow who imagined