dful of men.
For this feat he had won the cross; the papers had recorded his heroism,
and he had become known as one of the bravest soldiers in the army. But
gradually the hero had grown stout, embedded in flesh, timorous, lazy
and satisfied. In 1870, still a captain, he had been made a prisoner
in the first encounter, and he returned from Germany quite furious,
swearing that he would never be caught fighting again, for it was too
absurd. Being prevented from leaving the army, as he was incapable of
embracing any other profession, he applied for and obtained the position
of captain quartermaster, "a kennel," as he called it, "in which
he would be left to kick the bucket in peace." That day Mme Burle
experienced a great internal disruption. She felt that it was all over,
and she ever afterward preserved a rigid attitude with tightened lips.

A blast of wind shook the Rue des Recollets and drove the rain angrily
against the windowpanes. The old lady lifted her eyes from the smoking
vine roots now dying out, to make sure that Charles was not falling
asleep over his Latin exercise. This lad, twelve years of age, had
become the old lady's supreme hope, the one human being in whom she
centered her obstinate yearning for glory. At first she had hated him
with all the loathing she had felt for his mother, a weak and pretty
young lacemaker whom the captain had been foolish enough to marry when
he found out that she would not listen to his passionate addresses on
any other condition. Later on, when the mother had died and the father
had begun to wallow in vice, Mme Burle dreamed again in presence of that
little ailing child whom she found it so hard to rear. She wanted to see
him robust, so that he might grow into the hero that Burle had declined
to be, and for all her cold ruggedness she watched him anxiously,
feeling his limbs and instilling courage into his soul. By degrees,
blinded by her passionate desires, she imagined that she had at last
found the man of the family. The boy, whose temperament was of a gentle,
dreamy character, had a physical horror of soldiering, but as he lived
in mortal dread of his grandmother and was extremely shy and submissive,
he would echo all she said and resignedly express his intention of
entering the army when he grew up.

Mme Burle observed that the exercise was not progressing. In fact,
little Charles, overcome by the deafening noise of the storm, was
dozing, albeit his pen was between his