e shall meet again, but I shall never marry any one but you, I am yours
till death!'--Before he set out the general called me to him, and said:
'Dagobert, remain here; Mademoiselle Eva may have need of you to
fly from her family, if they should press too hard upon her; our
correspondence will have to pass through your hands; at Paris, I shall
see your wife and son; I will comfort them, and tell them you are my
friend.'"

"Always the same," said Rose, with emotion, as she looked affectionately
at Dagobert.

"As faithful to the father and mother as to their children," added
Blanche.

"To love one was to love them all," replied the soldier. "Well, the
general joined the Emperor at Elba; I remained at Warsaw, concealed in
the neighborhood of your mother's house; I received the letters, and
conveyed them to her clandestinely. In one of those letters--I feel
proud to tell you of it my children--the general informed me that the
Emperor himself had remembered me."

"What, did he know you?"

"A little, I flatter myself--'Oh! Dagobert!' said he to your father,
who was talking to him about me; 'a horse-grenadier of my old guard--a
soldier of Egypt and Italy, battered with wounds--an old dare-devil,
whom I decorated with my own hand at Wagram--I have not forgotten
him!'--I vow, children, when your mother read that to me, I cried like a
fool."

"The Emperor--what a fine golden face he has on the silver cross with
the red ribbon that you would sometimes show us when we behaved well."

"That cross--given by him--is my relic. It is there in my knapsack, with
whatever we have of value--our little purse and papers. But, to return
to your mother; it was a great consolation to her, when I took her
letters from the general, or talked with her about him--for she suffered
much--oh, so much! In vain her parents tormented and persecuted her;
she always answered: 'I will never marry any one but General Simon.' A
spirited woman, I can tell you--resigned, but wonderfully courageous.
One day she received a letter from the general; he had left the Isle of
Elba with the Emperor; the war had again broken out, a short campaign,
but as fierce as ever, and heightened by soldiers' devotion. In that
campaign of France; my children, especially at Montmirail, your father
fought like a lion, and his division followed his example it was no
longer valor--it was frenzy. He told me that, in Champagne, the peasants
killed so many of those Prussians, that