that,
after a long pause, she was unable to resist the temptation of again
putting her thought into words.

At the station entrance, while she was kissing her brother for the last
time, she had an encounter, a great surprise. "He" had approached, also
clad as an artillery officer, but alone, having to entrust his valise to
a good-natured man from the crowd.

Julio shot her a questioning look. Who was "he"? He suspected, but
feigned ignorance, as though fearing to learn the truth.

"Laurier," she replied laconically, "my former husband."

The lover displayed a cruel irony. It was a cowardly thing to ridicule
this man who had responded to the call of duty. He recognized his
vileness, but a malign and irresistible instinct made him keep on with
his sneers in order to discredit the man before Marguerite. Laurier a
soldier!--He must cut a pretty figure dressed in uniform!

"Laurier, the warrior!" he continued in a voice so sarcastic and strange
that it seemed to be coming from somebody else. . . . "Poor creature!"

She hesitated in her response, not wishing to exasperate Desnoyers any
further. But the truth was uppermost in her mind, and she said simply:

"No . . . no, he didn't look so bad. Quite the contrary. Perhaps it was
the uniform, perhaps it was his sadness at going away alone, completely
alone, without a single hand to clasp his. I didn't recognize him at
first. Seeing my brother, he started toward us; but then when he saw me,
he went his own way . . . Poor man! I feel sorry for him!"

Her feminine instinct must have told her that she was talking too much,
and she cut her chatter suddenly short. The same instinct warned her
that Julio's countenance was growing more and more saturnine, and his
mouth taking a very bitter curve. She wanted to console him and added:

"What luck that you are a foreigner and will not have to go to the war!
How horrible it would be for me to lose you!" . . .

She said it sincerely. . . . A few moments before she had been envying
men, admiring the gallantry with which they were exposing their lives,
and now she was trembling before the idea that her lover might have been
one of these.

This did not please his amorous egoism--to be placed apart from the
rest as a delicate and fragile being only fit for feminine adoration. He
preferred to inspire the envy that she had felt on beholding her brother
decked out in his warlike accoutrement. It seemed to him that something
was coming