entle words.

"Yes--yes--it is settled," they said; "anything that you wish, all that
you wish."

Both had the same thought--leave it to time; Jean is only a child; he
will change his mind.

In this, both were mistaken; Jean did not change his mind. In the month
of September, 1876, Paul de Lavardens was rejected at Saint-Cyr, and Jean
Reynaud passed eleventh at the Ecole Polytechnique. The day when the list
of the candidates who had passed was published, he wrote to the Abbe
Constantin:

"I have passed, and passed too well, for I wish to go into the army, and
not the civil service; however, if I keep my place in the school, that
will be the business of one of my comrades; he will have my chance."

It happened so in the end. Jean Reynaud did better than keep his place;
the pass-list showed his name seventh, but instead of entering 'l'Ecole
des Ponts et Chaussees', he entered the military college at Fontainebleau
in 1878.

He was then just twenty-one; he was of age, master of his fortune, and
the first act of the new administration was a great, a very great piece
of extravagance.

He bought for old Clemence and little Rosalie two shares in Government
stock of 1,500 francs each. That cost him 70,000 francs, almost the sum
that Paul de Lavardens, in his first year of liberty in Paris, spent for
Mademoiselle Lise Bruyere, of the Palais Royal Theatre.

Two years later Jean passed first at the examination, and left
Fontainebleau with the right of choosing among the vacant places. There
was one in the regiment quartered at Souvigny, and Souvigny was three
miles from Longueval. Jean asked for this, and obtained it.

Thus Jean Reynaud, lieutenant in the ninth regiment of artillery, came in
the month of October, 1880, to take possession of the house that had been
his father's; thus he found himself once more in the place where his
childhood had passed, and where every one had kept green the memory of
the life and death of his father; thus the Abbe Constantin was not denied
the happiness of once again having near him the son of his old friend,
and, if the truth must be told, he no longer wished that Jean had become
a doctor.

When the old Cure left his church after saying mass, when he saw coming
along the road a great cloud of dust, when he felt the earth tremble
under the rumbling cannon, he would stop, and, like a child, amuse
himself with seeing the regiment pass, but to him the regiment was--Jean.
It was this robu