se at least...."

"What will the general do to him?" inquired the girl anxiously.

"He won't have his head cut off, to be sure," answered Lieutenant
D'Hubert. "But his conduct is positively indecent. He's making no end of
trouble for himself by this sort of bravado."

"But he isn't parading the town," the maid murmured again.

"Why, yes! Now I think of it. I haven't seen him anywhere. What on earth
has he done with himself?"

"He's gone to pay a call," suggested the maid, after a moment of
silence.

Lieutenant D'Hubert was surprised. "A call! Do you mean a call on a
lady? The cheek of the man. But how do you know this?"

Without concealing her woman's scorn for the denseness of the masculine
mind, the pretty maid reminded him that Lieutenant Feraud had arrayed
himself in his best uniform before going out. He had also put on his
newest dolman, she added in a tone as if this conversation were getting
on her nerves and turned away brusquely. Lieutenant D'Hubert, without
questioning the accuracy of the implied deduction, did not see that it
advanced him much on his official quest. For his quest after Lieutenant
Feraud had an official character. He did not know any of the women this
fellow who had run a man through in the morning was likely to call on in
the afternoon. The two officers knew each other but slightly. He bit his
gloved finger in perplexity.

"Call!" he exclaimed. "Call on the devil." The girl, with her back to
him and folding the hussar's breeches on a chair, said with a vexed
little laugh:

"Oh, no! On Madame de Lionne." Lieutenant D'Hubert whistled softly.
Madame de Lionne, the wife of a high official, had a well-known salon
and some pretensions to sensibility and elegance. The husband was a
civilian and old, but the society of the salon was young and military
for the greater part. Lieutenant D'Hubert had whistled, not because the
idea of pursuing Lieutenant Feraud into that very salon was in the least
distasteful to him, but because having but lately arrived in Strasbourg
he had not the time as yet to get an introduction to Madame de Lionne.
And what was that swashbuckler Feraud doing there? He did not seem the
sort of man who...

"Are you certain of what you say?" asked Lieutenant D'Hubert.

The girl was perfectly certain. Without turning round to look at him
she explained that the coachman of their next-door neighbours knew
the _maitre-d'hotel_ of Madame de Lionne. In this way she got her
inf