existence so well, that no one suspected that he was married. The
reason of this reticence? If it is familiar to many military men who
may chance to be in a like predicament, it is perhaps worth while to
give the story.

Your genuine trooper (if it is allowable here to employ the word which
in the army signifies a man who is destined to die as a captain) is a
sort of serf, a part and parcel of his regiment, an essentially simple
creature, and Castanier was marked out by nature as a victim to the
wiles of mothers with grown-up daughters left too long on their hands.
It was at Nancy, during one of those brief intervals of repose when
the Imperial armies were not on active service abroad, that Castanier
was so unlucky as to pay some attention to a young lady with whom he
danced at a _ridotto_, the provincial name for the entertainments often
given by the military to the townsfolk, or vice versa, in garrison
towns. A scheme for inveigling the gallant captain into matrimony was
immediately set on foot, one of those schemes by which mothers secure
accomplices in a human heart by touching all its motive springs, while
they convert all their friends into fellow-conspirators. Like all
people possessed by one idea, these ladies press everything into the
service of their great project, slowly elaborating their toils, much
as the ant-lion excavates its funnel in the sand and lies in wait at
the bottom for its victim. Suppose that no one strays, after all, into
that carefully constructed labyrinth? Suppose that the ant-lion dies
of hunger and thirst in her pit? Such things may be, but if any
heedless creature once enters in, it never comes out. All the wires
which could be pulled to induce action on the captain's part were
tried; appeals were made to the secret interested motives that always
come into play in such cases; they worked on Castanier's hopes and on
the weaknesses and vanity of human nature. Unluckily, he had praised