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the satisfaction of duty fulfilled, of sacrifice accepted.

The memory of Madariaga came to his memory.

"Where we make our riches, and found a family--there is our country."

No, the statement of the centaur was not correct. In normal times,
perhaps. Far from one's native land when it is not exposed to danger,
one may forget it for a few years. But he was living now in France, and
France was being obliged to defend herself against enemies wishing to
overpower her. The sight of all her people rising en masse was becoming
an increasingly shameful torture for Desnoyers, making him think all the
time of what he should have done in his youth, of what he had dodged.

The veterans of '70 were passing through the streets, with the green and
black ribbon in their lapel, souvenirs of the privations of the Siege of
Paris, and of heroic and disastrous campaigns. The sight of these men,
satisfied with their past, made him turn pale. Nobody was recalling his,
but he knew it, and that was enough. In vain his reason would try to
lull this interior tempest. . . . Those times were different; then
there was none of the present unanimity; the Empire was unpopular . . .
everything was lost. . . . But the recollection of a celebrated sentence
was fixing itself in his mind as an obsession--"France still remained!"
Many had thought as he did in his youth, but they had not, therefore,
evaded military service. They had stood by their country in a last and
desperate resistance.

Useless was his excuse-making reasoning. Nobler thoughts showed him the
fallacy of this beating around the bush. Explanations and demonstrations
are unnecessary to the understanding of patriotic and religious ideals;
true patriotism does not need them. One's country . . . is one's
country. And the laboring man, skeptical and jesting, the self-centred
farmer, the solitary pastor, all had sprung to action at the sound
of this conjuring word, comprehending it instantly, without previous
instruction.

"It is necessary to pay," Don Marcelo kept repeating mentally. "I ought
to pay my debt."

As in his dreams, he was constantly feeling the anguish of an upright
and desperate man who wishes to meet his obligations.

Pay! . . . and how? It was now very late. For a moment the heroic
resolution came into his head of offering himself as a volunteer, of
marching with his bag at his side in some one of the groups of future
combatants, the same as the carpenter. But the usel