"What kind of penance?" asked M. Moriaz. "Paris is not a hermitage."
"Nor is it my intention to live there as a hermit," was the reply, given with perfect simplicity. "I go to give lessons in music and in the languages."
"Indeed!" exclaimed M. Moriaz. "Do you see no other career open to you, my dear count?"
"I am no longer a count," he replied, with an heroic smile. "Counts do not run about giving private lessons." And a strange light flashed in his eyes as he spoke. "I shall run about giving private lessons until I hear anew the voice that spoke to me in California. It will find me ever ready; my reply will be: 'I belong to thee; dispose of me at thy pleasure.' Ah! this chimera is one that I never will renounce!"
Then suddenly he started as one just awakening from a dream; he drew his hand over his brow, looked confusedly around him, and said: "_Grand Dieu!_ here I have been talking to you of myself for two hours! It is the most stupid way of passing one's time, and I promise you it shall not happen again."
With these words he rose, took up his hat, and left.
M. Moriaz paced the floor for some moments, his hands behind his back; presently he said: "This _diable_ of a man has strangely moved me. One thing alone spoils his story for me--that is the gun. A man who once has drunk will drink again; one who has invented will invent again. No man in the world ever remained satisfied with his first gun."
"I beg of you, monsieur," cried Mlle. Moiseney, "could you not speak to the Minister of War about adopting the Larinski musket?"
"Are you your country's enemy?" he asked. "Do you wish its destruction? Have you sworn that after Alsace we must lose Champagne?"
"I am perfectly sure," she replied, mounting on her high horse, "that the Larinski musket is a _chef-d'oeuvre_, and I would pledge my life that he who invented it is a man of genius."
"If you would pledge your word of honour to that, mademoiselle," he replied, making her a profound bow, "you may well feel assured that the French Government would not hesitate a moment."
Mlle. Moriaz took no part in this conversation. Her face slightly contracted, buried in her thoughts as in a solitude inaccessible to earthly sounds, her cheek resting in the palm of her left hand, she held in her right hand a paper-cutter, and she kept pricking the point into one of the grooves of the table on which her elbow rested, while her half-closed eyes were fixed on a knot of the mahogany. She saw in this knot the Isthmus of Panama, San Francisco, the angelic countenance of the beautiful Polish woman who had given birth to Count Abel Larinski; she saw there also fields of snow, ambuscades, retreats more glorious than victories, and, beyond all else, the bursting of a gun and of a man's heart.