e 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 Leon, 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 Leon here? So many idle
servants in my house, and my own child to die for lack of care!"

Madame Regnault never knew how Leon died. The little body was not
mangled: it had been caught and thrown aside by something attached to
the engine--I do not know exactly how--and the mother was left to
believe that he had died of sickness like the baby. She bore her sorrow
with the still meekness consonant with her character, and with wifely
tenderness exerted herself to soothe her husband's violent grief.

A little later in the summer the war broke out. Colonel Regnault went
gladly, even rashly, into danger, and found neither death nor wounds,
but in his anguish for the desolation of his country he made a truce
with his own remorse.

The last time I was in Paris--which was in 1874--General and Madame
Regnault called on me at my old friend's, Madame Le Fort's. A charming
little girl about three year