"No, my dear, it is too hard a jaunt for you: I will go to-morrow."
"Let me go, Léon: I feel so uneasy about the children. I cannot tell why, but it seems as if something was going to happen to them."
"What could happen to them? and what difference will a day make? I am glad I am not a woman, to be so anxious about nothing," said the colonel, smiling.
About eleven o'clock on the morrow the colonel reached Rosny, and was startled as he approached the house by an appearance of unusual stir, persons going in and out in a hurried and excited way. He entered. The nurse rushed toward him in vehement anguish: "Oh, Colonel Regnault, you are here! John has told you. Where is he? Did he not return with you?"
"I have not seen your husband, good woman. What is the matter? Are the children ill? I came out for them."
"Oh, I cannot tell him! I cannot tell him!" sobbed the unhappy woman. "The dear beautiful babies! It breaks my heart!"
"May God help you to bear it, sir: it is a heavy grief," said an aged woman. "The little boys are dead."
"Dead!" cried the heartstricken father—"my children dead! One of them, you mean—not both, not both!"
It was true. The baby, a dear little fellow six or seven months old, had had for several days a cold which the nurse did not think serious: during the night he had been attacked by croup, and about eight o'clock in the morning, almost before the doctor had arrived, the child was dead. Absorbed in the grief and terror of this sudden death, the nurse forgot to mind Léon, and the restless, active child slipped out of the house unheeded, and, playing on the railway-track, had been killed by a passing train not an hour before his father came for him.
Colonel Regnault's grief was violent and remorseful. "I have killed my children," he would say to his pitying friends. "If I had but listened to my wife and had them brought up at home! What is the croup with a watchful, intelligent mother, and a skillful physician at the very door? and how could any accident have happened to Léon here? So many idle servants in my house, and my own child to die for lack of care!"