Louise flushed and caught at the chair back. "Yes, I have seen him many times. I know not whether I shall see him again. Who can tell who has returned and who not? Nine in each ten have remained."
"Oh, sister, and you love him—is it not so?"
"Love—bah! One has other things to think of than love when one is running in front of the Cossack sabres. Let us talk no more of the war, sister, nor yet of love; let me thank le bon Dieu that I have done both with one and the other; I would rest and rest and again rest."
"Poor Louise," said Marie, kissing her; "poor Louise!"
Afterwards she added, speaking of this to her husband, that Louise must indeed have supped her fill of horrors since even love had been forgotten in the tumults and terrors of war.
Louise submitted to be presented with a new uniform, which her father bought for her the very next day. She would rather have donned her woman's skirt, but for several reasons she consented to figure a while at least as Michel Prevost. One of these was the distaste she felt in her present condition of weakness and utter fatigue of mind and body for any sort of argument or discussion with her father. Another was an irresistible desire to move among those who had returned from the war, in order that she might gather any information there might be with regard to the fate of Henri.
Louise had not altogether despaired of him. Soldiers and officers still dribbled daily into Paris, emaciated, tattered, half-alive; men who had somehow lagged, through wounds or illness, and had contrived to escape the countless dangers which assailed them in their solitary retreat through a hostile country. Why should not Henri have escaped, like others? She would allow herself to hope a little; just a very little.
And about a month after her own arrival a wonderful day dawned for her. Seated at a restaurant close to a table at which sat four officers of Henri's regiment, Louise suddenly caught the sound of his name.
"That makes seven alive," some one was saying; "one better than we thought. Certainly no one could have supposed that D'Estreville would reappear. His has been, I think, the narrowest escape of all. His trials have depressed even his spirit. Have any of you ever seen Henri depressed? He will be here, presently, you shall judge for yourselves. Sapristi! he has left his gaiety with all Ney's guns in the Niemen. Seven officers out of forty——"
Flushed, giddy, almost swooning for joy, Louise stumbled out of the restaurant. "I will return immediately," she told the astonished waiter.