their age, nevertheless, the thing is not so very difficult, and they had soon forgotten all the discomforts of their adventurous expedition, and only thought of the most important of its results.

They believed that peace was made with the Hussars; but, alas! it was only a truce. At the moment when they least expected it, when they were a thousand leagues from this sublunary world, blared out eighty trumpets, sustained by several trombones, playing the air well known to French soldiers, ‘We ourselves are Victory!’ What chance was there of resisting such a tempest? The poor lovers were greatly to be pitied.

No, not so much to be pitied, for at the end, the officers left the dining-room, defiling before the door of the blue room with a loud clatter of sabres and spurs, and crying one after the other:

‘Good-night, my lady bride!’

Then all the noise stopped. I am wrong. The Englishman went into the corridor and cried:

‘Waiter, bring me another bottle of the same port.’

Calm was re-established in the hotel of N—. The night was balmy, the moon at its full. Since time immemorial lovers have loved to watch our satellite. Leo and his lady opened their window, which looked on a little garden, and breathed with pleasure the fresh air scented by a bower of clematis.

They did not remain there very long all the same. A man was walking in the garden, his head bowed, his arms crossed, a cigar in his mouth. Leo thought he recognized the nephew of the Englishman who liked the good port wine.

I hate useless details, and besides, I do not feel myself obliged to tell the reader anything that he can easily imagine, nor to recount hour by hour all that passed in the hotel of N—. I shall say then that the candle which burned on the fireless mantelpiece of the blue room was more than half consumed when, in the chamber of the Englishman, lately silent, a strange noise was heard, like that which a heavy body makes in falling. To this noise was joined a kind of crackling not less strange, followed by a stifled cry, and some indistinct words like an oath. The two young occupants of the blue room shuddered. Perhaps they had been awakened with a start. On both of them this noise, which they did not try to account for, had made an almost sinister impression.

‘It’s our Englishman dreaming,’ said Leo, forcing himself to smile.

But he failed to reassure his companion, and he shivered involuntarily. Two or three minutes afterwards a door opened in the corridor, cautiously it seemed; then it was shut very quietly. A slow, ill-assured step was heard which, as far as all appearances went, was trying to pass unnoticed.

‘This confounded inn!’ cried Leo.

‘Ah, it is Paradise!’ answered the young woman, letting her head fall on Leo’s shoulder. ‘I’m dead sleepy.’

She sighed and fell asleep again almost at once.

An illustrious moralist has said that men are never talkative when they have nothing more to ask. Let no one be astonished, then, if Leo made no effort to renew the conversation, or to discuss the noises in the hotel of N—. In spite of himself he was preoccupied with them, and his imagination linked up with them many circumstances to which, in another mood, he would have paid no attention. The sinister figure of the Englishman’s nephew returned to his memory. There was hate in the look he had thrown on his uncle, all the while he spoke to him with humility, without a doubt because he was asking money from him.