Front matter (continued 13)

He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great interest.

It was extraordinary that neither he nor Madame had brought any luggage.... Madame Potier fairly writhed with curiosity to learn the reason why. She could restrain herself no longer. She cried, madly clashing the gate keys:

"But the luggage, Madame! ... The carriage has driven away without depositing it. What of the trunks, imperials, portmanteaux, bonnet boxes that Madame possessed when she went away?..."

She was a little, voluble, excitable Frenchwoman, with shiny black hair, bright, snapping black eyes, and a hectic spot in the center of each cheek. As yet her environment had not brought home to her what War meant in reality. When she had wept for her brother and her nephew by marriage, and at parting with her husband, she had relapsed into her accustomed round of duties, not unpleasantly varied by her newer responsibilities as guardian of her mistress's empty dwelling. Like many other excellent women of her type, she could not read or write, and relied on local news imparted by her gossips and bits of intelligence left by the baker with his bread rolls, or served by the woman who brought the morning's milk.

Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:

"The boxes and imperials are left behind in Belgium, dear Madame Potier. As for the articles I brought with me, they have been torn to pieces by the lancers of M. de Bismarck. Also the luggage of this gentleman, who has, like myself, nothing left but the clothes that he is wearing. Thank him, for had he not protected me, I should never have reached this house!"

"Great Heaven!" Little Madame Potier threw her hands and eyes heavenward. "What wretches! What terrible dangers Madame has surmounted!... What horrors one hears of!—what miseries and sufferings!... Death is everywhere.... One would say it was the end of the world! But still there is hope, is not there, Madame?... Our glorious Army..."

Juliette turned a snow-white face upon the eager woman, and lifted a little, tragic hand. She said, and in that tone and with that look most feared and dreaded by the man who loved her:

"Our glorious Army has been betrayed and massacred! With these eyes I who speak to you have seen vast tracts of country covered with the slain!"

Madame Potier winced and drew herself together. Her black eyes glared. The red spots sank out of her sharp face. And Juliette went on:

"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage. Many Germans were there—but most of the dead were our French soldiers.... And in the silence you heard their blood running, and the earth lapping it like a great thirsty dog!..."

In the throat of the other woman, listening, an hysterical knot began growing. You could see it working as her dry lips twitched. She held her breath as though to keep back a scream.

"I sought among all these dead men for my father," said Juliette. "And I found him!... His dead hand beckoned me from a mountain of corpses.... I would have known it without the ring that he always wore.... And I went to him and sat beside him, and asked God to let me die also.... And a sword seemed to cut my soul from my body.... I grew cold—and all was blackness about me!... I felt no more ... I breathed no more ... I thought: 'This must be death!' Then a voice spoke to me.... I was too far away to answer. It called me loudly—and I came to life again.... I rose up.... I saw the face of the man who had called me.... And then I knew why I must not die just yet!"

She laughed, and so strangely that Madame Potier cried out in terror. She would have rushed at the girl and clutched her but for Breagh's strong interposing hand. He said in her ear in the bad French she took for Belgian:

"Madame has traveled many miles, fasting, and she has suffered a great bereavement.... Do not question her, but go and make ready her apartment, and prepare food for her. Hot soup—she needs that before all!"

The little woman addressed looked sharply at the speaker, then mounted the two steps leading to the terrace, scuttled across it in front of the shuttered windows of the drawing-room and billiard-room, descended the steps upon the other side, and vanished in the direction of the basement kitchen door.

Then P. C. Breagh, wondering at his own daring, stretched out a hand and touched Juliette's. It was very cold. He lifted it gently and led her unresisting down the ivy-bordered path that led into the pleasance.

For she must not be left alone in this mood, and the garden was still, and scented, and beautiful in the noonday sunshine. Its beds of autumn flowers blazed from their setting of smooth and still verdant turf. The great wistaria on the stable buildings was magnificent in trails of fading purple blossoms. The oaks were browning, the chestnuts shedding their yellow fans. The stately limes were bleached pale golden, the tall acacias were already stripped quite bare.

It was not yet the season of song for thrush and blackbird, but the robin's sweet shrill twitter came from the heart of a hawthorn, marvelously laden with gorgeous crimson fruit. The breast of the bird, not yet attired in fullest winter plumage, showed orange as japonica berries beside the ripe haws' splendid hue.

Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:

"Look at him! What a pretty little beggar! Nobody ever told me you had robins in France!..." Then as the bird cocked his round bright eye and hopped to a higher twig, and Juliette's pale face remained unchanged, and her fixed stare blankly ignored him, her sorrowful friend cried out in a passion of entreaty:

"Juliette! Juliette, take care! For the love of God, don't yield to this! Oh, Juliette! have pity upon others, even if you have none on yourself!"

The cry touched a chord that responded in vibration. The stiff waxen mask softened, and became the face he knew. She looked at him, and her eyes were no longer fixed and glassy. She asked in wonder:

"What do you want me to do?"

Trees hid them from the house with its closed slatted shutters. They were near a rustic seat that was under the great tulip tree. Breagh led her to the seat, made her sit down, and sat himself beside her. He made no effort to retain the little hand. "It is not mine," he said to himself, as he looked at it, and then his heart jolted, and stood still.... Where was her wedding ring?... Didn't French married ladies wear the plain gold circlet? Of course they did! Then why?... Came her faint, sad voice again:

"What is it I might do and do not do, for myself and others? Tell me, Monsieur, for I do not like to be unkind!"

He said, trying to speak clearly and unemotionally: "It is because you love so greatly those who are near you that I ask you to be kind to these and to yourself. You have suffered a great loss, you brood upon it to your injury.... You dream of revenge upon a man, high-placed and powerful, whom you accuse of having brought about the War."

She had taken off the black silk veil that she had worn as head covering. A dry leaf fluttered down from the tulip tree and crowned her splendid coils of mist-black hair. Her thin arched brows were drawn together and frowning; from the dark caverns that Grief had hollowed round them looked eyes that were cold and hard and brilliant as blue diamonds. She asked in almost a whisper:

"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not justified?... Because he saved your life, do you take his part?"

Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:

"I take no part. I speak for your own good. If a woman as frail and sensitive as you are yields to the promptings of a hate so overwhelming, a time comes when she cannot, if she would, control them or rule herself.... When voices sound in her ears, urging her to deeds of violence, and she cannot silence them by any prayers.... Then she goes away into a strange dim country peopled with shadows—lovely or queer, strange or awful. And that is the country of Madness, where live the insane.... Even those who love her as I—as your friends and your husband love you!—can never reach her there!"

The pleading seemed to touch her. Two great tears over-brimmed her pure pale underlids and fell upon her shabby black gown. She said, trembling a little:

"You are very good to have so much solicitude for me. I thank you very humbly. It is true that I have sustained a terrible wound, and that it rankles—is that the right word? My nature is not gentle—not amiable!—I long to strike back when I am wounded.... When those I love are hurt..." She stopped and controlled herself with a visible effort, then resumed: "I have it in me to be pitiless! See you well, there is something of my mother in me!"

"Of your mother?..."

He echoed the words in dismay that was almost ludicrous.... He had never asked whether Juliette possessed a mother or not. Now he looked to the house, expecting one of the shuttered French windows to open, anticipating the appearance of a middle-aged lady arrayed in mourning crape and weepers, and Juliette followed and understood his look. She said, with sorrowful meaning:

"Where friends of my father live. Monsieur, you do not find my mother. She is very beautiful, but not good, not noble, as he!... She left him many years ago, when I was an infant. See! I could not have been higher than that!" She measured with her hand above the turf the height of the baby of five years, with hair that had been silky and yellow as newly hatched chickens' down. She said, her clear, transparent face darkening with the shadow that swept across her memory: "Before I encountered you at Gravelotte I had passed through a terrible experience. This lady—of whom I dread to speak!—was thrown across my path. She did not reveal to me that she was my mother, when I quitted Brussels in her company.... She represented herself as the wife of an officer who had been wounded. She told me that my father was a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians. She took me to Rethel, that I might lay my case before the Prince Imperial, and beg him to obtain my father's release."

P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing—what he most feared for her. She said, drawing a folded envelope from the bosom of her black school dress:

"Never shall I forget how graciously Monseigneur received me. Here is a little keepsake he gave me with his own hand.... You shall hold it in yours, because you are my friend, and Monseigneur would permit it.... No one else, because no one deserves it save you!"

And she exhibited with dainty pride the splinter of rusty scrap iron. The envelope bore a small Imperial crown in gold, with the initial "E" beneath.... It was directed in violet ink and in a handwriting pointed and elegantly feminine, to S. A. the Prince Imperial, with the Great Headquarters of the Imperial Army, at the Prefecture of Metz.

"He is so brave!... He wanted to join M. de Bazaine and fight the Prussians. He stamped ... he wept ... he suffered such chagrin when the telegram came from the Emperor.... No! I must not tell you of the telegram.... My Prince said: 'Mademoiselle shall hear it because she is discreet!'..."

She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her innocent heart. Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C. Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her. The shadow came back for a moment as she told him:

"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away.... She had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she had encountered a stranger passing through the hall.... Then I went back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly. Madame—whom I had discovered to be my mother!—was engaged with a visitor.... I do not know at all who he was. But I heard him say, on the other side of the door that was between us ... 'When she comes, you shall present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!' And he laughed.... Mon Dieu! how strange a laugh!... It made me feel cold. It makes me cold even now to remember it.... But I do not think I have been really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my mother said: 'The discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!'"

With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had been stung. Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like that?... Who was she? Where had they encountered?... He beat his brains to evoke some reply, in vain. And Juliette went on:

"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at first I would not. You will understand how terrible it was to discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have believed dead until a few months ago. There was something in her very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!—that made me regard her with terror.... See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to overcome that terror. Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her bed. When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever. The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep. And hers was a sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions.... Without waking she said a thing so strange.... 'Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of such infamy!' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"

For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet. His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes rounded unbecomingly. He remembered when and where he had heard that utterance—in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.

What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their irony, terrible in their implied contempt?

"It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!"

And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience, roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.

So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard! How strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that house! What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck? What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel? Who was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen of Diamonds?... And how true had been the instinct that had warned the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it impossible for her to conceive?

She was speaking:

"Do not think me wicked or insensible, Monsieur. I am deeply sensible of all your goodness!... I know very well that there is truth in what you say!... You are noble, candid, magnanimous.... You do not comprehend what it is to hate so that it is torture ... like fire burning here, here, and here!..."

She touched her slight bosom and her throat with the joined finger-tips of her small hands, shielded her eyes and forehead with them an instant, then swept them wide apart. A curious gesture, and notable, in its suggestion of surging overwhelming emotion, and the dominance of an impulse obsessing in its evil strength.

"Here where it is so quiet I shall recover in a little.... I shall become calmer.... I shall learn to sleep again.... You cannot imagine how much I wish to sleep, Monsieur!... But when I lie down it is as though great doors in my brain were thrown wide open. There is music ... and processions of people come pouring, pouring through.... There are voices that make great clamor—there are hands that wave to me and beckon. But I clench my own hands and lie still—so very still! I pray to Our Lord that one figure may not pass among the others, for then I know I shall have to get up and follow him.... I cry to Our Lady to cover my eyes with Her cool hands, that I may not see if he does come. But always he passes; walking or driven in a chariot—riding a great horse, or borne upon the shoulders of guards. And then I resist no more, for it is useless! I wake!—and I am standing in the middle of my room!"

Said P. C. Breagh, comprehending the situation: "In a word, you are suffering from overstrain and consequent insomnia. And I wish I were a full-blown M.D., because I think I should know what to do. But you will let me prescribe the doctor, if I may not undertake the case, won't you? What's that? Who's there?"

Something like a gurgling laugh had sounded behind them, and Juliette glanced round, and back at Carolan with something of the old gayety in her eyes.

"It is the Satyr of the pool, where Madame Tessier grows her water plants. He laughs like that when the water bubbles in his throat."

She rose and followed a little path leading through a shrubbery of lilac and syringa. Beyond rose the ivy-hung and creeper-covered eastern boundary wall of the pleasance. From the grinning mouth of the Satyr mask wrought in gray stone the slender spring spouted no longer. It trickled from a hole in the pipe behind the mask, and yet the laugh sounded at intervals as of old. The wall below the mask was wet, and green with a slimy moss-growth, fed by the dampness; the ferns that bordered the pool, the water plants that grew in it, had suffered from the diminution of their supply. The brook had diminished to a slender trickle winding among stones crowned with dry and withering mosses. Juliette cried out at the spectacle in sheer dismay.

What would Madame say if she knew how spoiled was this, her cherished bit of sylvan beauty? Never mind. When she returned all should be found in order of the best. The kitchen garden, perforce neglected since the departure of M. Potier, should be weeded diligently. The dead roses should be snipped off with loving care, the withered blossoms pulled from the sheaths of the flaming gladioli.... The place needed a mistress, that was plain to Mademoiselle de Bayard's order-loving eye.

"We will work here!..." she said, and almost clapped her hands at the thought of the pleasant labor waiting them. "Me, I adore gardening! And you also—do you not, Monsieur?..."

Could P. C. Breagh deny? He cried with a hot flush of joy at the thought of long days of sweet companionship: "Indeed I do!... and of course I will, Madame!"

"'Madame!...'"

She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip close down upon its rosy fellow.... Was she not married? Nearly, if not quite....

So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would maintain the character of a recent bride. It would be better not to rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.

LXII

How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of? In January they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and had spent together not quite three days.... But what days! to brand themselves upon the memory. After that morning on the bloody field of Gravelotte—that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of Madame Guyot—that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be ever anything but friends?... Close friends ... dear comrades, linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of experiences unforgettable by both.... What would Life be like when one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of Monica's brother?... Juliette did not dare to question. The thought of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.

Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming Madame served with the best that could be got. A lentil soup—an omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden. One would do better later, let Madame only wait.... The apartment of Madame Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian gentleman.... Or—since that room was dismantled for cleaning purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining ... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage? She would guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?... Had they not slept in that bed for ten years past?... Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....

The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh. And from that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker, began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked nothing better than that it should last.

It was exquisite autumn weather. They rose early, and passed out of the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve. Or they would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée. Then they would come back to déjeuner, laid on a table under the trees on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or talk. But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two months they never exchanged a word about the War.

It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his practicing degree in Medicine, and under this régime the shadow that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day. He had taken Madame Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of her master. She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her. Sleep returned, strength revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less poignant. She could look back upon the happiness of their old life together without the anguish that rends the heart.

Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for housekeeping. Under the able management of the hectic little woman, a very little money went a long way. Such butter, such cheese of Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens, such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been better served. The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and Monsieur.... She waited upon them at table, and joined in their conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.

As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort. The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with rapture. Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant boast:

"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living woman could cook ragoût of veal except his wife!"

She whipped off the cover. Madame Charles helped Monsieur in silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's hands. For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling hot plate before him:

"M. Potier was quite right! If the woman lives who can cook a better ragoût, I've never met her, Madame!"

Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head of the table. Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip was preternaturally long. She helped herself to a very little of the dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm. Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff. She said:

"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the menus she used to prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel." She crossed herself at the mention of the dead man's name.

Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her. She laid down her knife and fork. P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at Madame Potier. But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself. She went on, as though she had never broken off:

"Menus composed of excellent—but excellent dishes!... What a pity to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!—Look you, to cook well is an art that may be easily forgotten!... Hey, Madame is not eating to-day!"

Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:

"There is a little too much sugar in the ragoût, dear Madame Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says—excellent!"

"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar——" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him, figuratively.

"Who does not put sugar? Will Monsieur answer me?"

The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's. And the silvery accents of Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:

"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases you—the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt—these are due to sugar—burnt and added at the last moment. But one should use it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"

"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion, smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.

And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:

"Do you find it so incredible? Well, I will not boast now, but presently—you shall see!"

Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or crested wren. The twelve o'clock déjeuner was memorable, the five o'clock dinner a marvel, from the croûte au pot to the sole au gratin, and from the sole to the filet aux champignons! There were beignets afterward—crisp, adorable, light as bubbles. P. C. Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled. Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling eyes.

Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of thin filmy black. Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin. Her dainty slimness was emphasized by the absence of all ornament. Her marvelous black hair, fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled temples with its dusky coils. When she lifted a slender arm to thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.

She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among casseroles and stew pots. Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie—a Titania robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart. For the heart of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.

She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and tone and inflection were for him—and no other man.... This remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him and his Infanta.... And other knowledge, too, was his, held in common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he had not dared to share with Juliette.

But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept from her. She was cured. There could hardly be a relapse into the old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth. And even if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or hear it from the lips of some stranger. It was a miracle that she had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France—her beloved France.

"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the brink of an open grave!" he said to himself. "Have I been right or wrong? Only Time can tell!"

Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee. Behind those little black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh unspeakable things. She had been faithful in guarding them from the knowledge of Juliette. But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You must speak to-night, Monsieur! We have done our best, but we two cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia will enter Versailles!"

She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had said: "Remember!" P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task, felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.

As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the forehead. He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the dessert plate before him. He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly, holding it so as to hide his mouth. Over it his troubled gray eyes scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety. Why had Juliette thrown the flower? Why had she challenged him? She, who had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness. Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?

She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction that her grandmother would have been horrified. But it had been impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose and the pleasant lips.

He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a visit to the tailor. His new linen was spotless, and under the narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie. The bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it. How careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!

She was restless this evening. He had aroused her curiosity. Some hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen, and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped out....

There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down. A white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut. The countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.

Her room was on the east front, facing the garden.... A downward glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.

Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops. The presence of so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.

How rash!... How unwise! Did the young man desire a fever? Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of her tongue. She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head and gone away.

"I've got to tell!—and I don't want to tell!—and I don't know how to tell, that's the bother of it!... Give it up!... For another night!"

Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and expectation, to her recently vacated couch.

You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners. Those eyes could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had seen.... When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....

Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held against the heart that shook one with its beating.... Was it wicked to feel that one hated Charles Tessier? Was it unnatural, in these days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?... Was it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following night?...

True—she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would be by and by.... Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?

LXIII

But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation. The missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing fright. The shade of her grandmother seemed to rise, appalling in its shocked propriety. One could almost hear her saying: "My unhappy child, you have become more like your mother than I could have believed, had I not seen!..."

Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling her terror.

"What is the matter? Why are you so dull and distrait? Are you tired of living shut up in a garden? Answer me, I pray you, Monsieur!"

He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and his broad red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination. He said doggedly:

"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in this garden! I believe you know that very well!"

She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:

"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at you in the night from my window. See! Thus, with the hands miles deep in the pockets, and the shoulders elevated to the tips of the ears!"

She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the midnight cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading between the dinner table and the long windows that opened toward the lawn. He recognized himself, and reddened, while he laughed with vexation. He had never before seen her in this mood of Puck-like mischief. He had yet to become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.

"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he asked her, and she answered with sudden gravity:

"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur.... It is a gift, of the good angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use. To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible. He or she is born ... and that is all I know...." She added: "When I make my appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a billet de faveur. Then you shall see acting. I promise you!"

She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.

"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with paint? ... Non, merci! The true artist says to herself, 'I am old!' and she is old.... 'I am ugly!' and she becomes hideous. 'I am wicked!' See here!... Is this a face to regard with love, Monsieur?"

The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken. No Japanese mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered, scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment back. Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:

"Or I can be stupid, very stupid—if that will please you!... Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls.... We had one at the Convent—your countrywoman and a great heiress. Miss Smizz—the daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."

She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle through the merest slits. She giggled inanely, and said, combining the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a hen-turkey...

"All the eggstras.... Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a Forchud to fall bag od? Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's wife!"

She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her expectations, and her splutter:

"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!... I am perhaps a little excited. There is something strange in the air.... I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were talking very softly.... What is it?" she asked in bewilderment, pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples. "What is the matter with me to-night?..."

Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to Destiny:

"There is nothing the matter with you!... That is the glory of it! You were ill, and now you are well.... You can laugh again, and sleep again, and cook a dinner and help to eat it.... You have made capital use of your time!... For we came here on the twenty-first of August, and this is the fifth of October. We have been shut up in a garden, as you say yourself, for more than six weeks!..."

"Can it be possible?"

She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness. He answered with a glow of pride in his work:

"Fact! And in all the time you have never seen a newspaper or asked a question about the War. Even when you have heard the great guns firing from the forts below Paris—Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and the rest—you never said a word that showed you noticed.... Do you know why?..."

His voice wavered exultantly. She looked at him and slightly shook her head.

"No!..."

"Because I willed you to. By George! there are times when I believe that even yet I'd make a doctor. Mental suggestion was the line I took with you...." He rubbed his hands. "Not that I could have done anything without the help of Madame Potier—first-class little woman!—regular brick that she is!... You see, your brain had sucked up all the trouble it was capable of holding. You wanted rest.... Well, you've had it, thank God! Night after night I've walked up and down, backward and forward, on the lawn, just as you saw me doing last night, saying: 'Sleep! Forget! You have my orders to!"

The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of her mouth twitched with repressed laughter. He was beautiful in her eyes as he leaned forward smiling at her. She said, repressing her tears, and concealing her admiration:

"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something else, Monsieur...."

There was a swift change in him, telling her that for once he was not listening. His eyes were alert, his ear eagerly drank in a sound composed of many sounds that grew louder as they came more near. Now the whole room was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter clink of spur and scabbard and bridle.... Cavalry were passing up one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence—not the Avenue of St. Cloud—probably the Rue des Chantiers—there was a distant roar of cheers.... Then in one little oasis of silence came the rolling of carriages, and then the walls shivered with the roaring of lusty lungs:

"Hoch der König! Hoch der Kronprinz!"—and the shouts were drowned in a great burst of martial music, and the trampling of men and horses, mingled with the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets, rolled on tumultuously again.

The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her heart as she listened. Then the double doors of the dining room were butted open with the corner of a wooden coffee tray, and Madame Potier appeared with a steaming pot and two cups. She was pale round the hectic patches that blazed in her thin face. Her black eyes leaped to Breagh's with an eager question in them ... "Have you told her?" ... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen. She went to the little woman and kissed her on the cheek. She said, taking one of the gnarled work-worn hands in one of hers and holding out the other to Carolan:

"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now what in your great compassion you have kept from me. For I think the time has come when I must hear!"

The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian cavalry hoofs upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll of the carriages that came with them. And before either of those the girl addressed could speak in answer, the resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced their silence:

"Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!"

And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin trap: "Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream, shrill and thin and clear.... Then a crash!... Madame Potier had dropped her coffee tray.... Before the hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the Tessier carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly, violently snatched from him. He sprang to his feet, but Madame Potier had been quicker than he. She had caught the girl round the waist, and now wrestled with her.... The silent, desperate strife was horrible. The slender black-clad figure writhed for freedom like a snake.... Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it.... They carried her to the sofa and laid her down....

"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said angrily. "Why leave it to the Prussians to break the news?..." Tears were running down her cheeks as she unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the limp hands, while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a drop or two at a time.

And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly, and Madame Potier was answering: "It was nothing!... Madame was startled into an attack of faintness when I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee tray. Now I shall go and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to Madame as she lies there. She must hear everything that we have kept from her.... Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"

And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain directed at the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a chair near the sofa where his wan Infanta lay, and sat down and told her all.

Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked. Not a leaf stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note. But the strange sound that had haunted not only the ears of Juliette went on incessantly. It was the sighing and whispering and muttering of the vast crowds that had filled the Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to witness the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted the standard of the Hohenzollerns)—filled the upper end of the Avenue de Paris—and surged over the vast expanse of the Place d'Armes, beating in black and restless human waves against the lofty blue and golden railings of the Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the red Geneva Cross.

We know what he had to tell her.... The false step of MacMahon, the unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out of Metz, the conflict on the Meuse, ending in defeat and the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns and transport. The flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress city of Sedan.... The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited French forces and the Three Armies. The taking of 20,000 French prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his resignation of the chief command into the hands of General Wimpffen, summoned from his command in Algeria in time to capitulate. The pitiable surrender of the Emperor's sword to the King of Prussia. His transport into Belgium as a prisoner of War. The flight of the Empress from the Tuileries. The formation at Paris of the New Government of National Defense. The entry of the King of Prussia into Rheims, and the arrival of the First and Third Armies in force before Paris. The fight upon the heights of Châtillon—the defeat of Ducrot by a Bavarian Division—the German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers—the investment of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.

For three days the Crown Prince had been established with his Staff at the Prefecture. This day had seen the Great Headquarters of the Prussian King removed to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle of Ferrières....

Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette. She lay still during the recital, only quivering now and then. She drank the coffee when Madame Potier brought it, and thanked the faithful soul affectionately. When the gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters shut, she bade P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave him both hands, saying with a liquid glance:

"Thank you, my friend!..."

He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:

"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."

And she nodded in assent. But when he had gone to his bed at the cottage, the old terrible thoughts came crowding back.

That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver instrument of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and brought them like hornets buzzing and stinging about her ears.... She longed for her friend, but he had departed. And the loneliness was too terrible to bear.

She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought with her, and often wore when walking in the garden upon chilly evenings, or going to Mass in the early mornings, before the sunshine had warmed the air. One turn of the wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and body. Thus shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon the lock of the door.

As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came clattering down the cobbled street. They were pulled up outside the Tessier mansion. There was an imperious tug at the gate bell. She waited for the opening of the kitchen door.

Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame Potier's clogs upon the terrace. Klop—klop—klop! they crossed the leads, descended the three steps that led to the gravel walk, and went on to the iron gate. It was locked, as always, in the absence of Madame Tessier. Presently the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the mortise, and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....

Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a frightful German accent, turned the listening girl to ice. There was an exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder in the stranger's gutturals. A horse trampled. The rough voice of the rider swore at the brute in German. Then there was a clatter of boots upon the pavement, with a great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the now-dismounted rider said in his infamous French jargon:

"Go you before and open! His Excellency is coming in!"

Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across the terrace like a frightened beetle. Juliette, paralyzed with horror, heard the heavy spurred footsteps crunch and jingle up the gravel walk and ascend the steps to the hall door. Almost directly, as little Madame Potier darted panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall doorbell clanged a deafening peal.

A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and stopped before the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron echoes had ceased shouting through the house of the Tessiers. There were other voices at the gate, other footsteps upon the gravel.... They mounted the steps. A resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble.... I will interview the people of the house myself!"

The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that had terrified Madame Potier:

"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."

The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In that case, Herr Intendant General, my Excellency will take the risk. There are only women in the house, and should they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."

There was a laugh—gay, mellow, and careless—and a young man's voice answered:

"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"

There was another laugh. Under cover of it, Madame Potier hissed into the head folds of the white shawl:

"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the Foreign Office upon us. That is what the sacred brute in the big boots and spectacles shouted, when I went down to open the front gate.... What is the Prussian Foreign Office?"

From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper hissed at her:

"It is a man. They call him Count Bismarck. Now if you love me, be quiet, and watch and listen. He shall ring the bell with his own hand.... Then I open the door!..."

"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.

No verbal answer.... The white shawl pulled closer, shrouding round the slender form and girlish features. A little hand, firm and unfaltering, ready upon the latch of the door.

Poor Potier whimpered....

"Madame Charles.... My child! my treasure! for the love of Christ and Mary!... Tell me what you are going to do!"

The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand upon it. She well knew whose was the hand. And the snow-water in her veins became liquid fire. She threw open the hall door and stepped back to admit the Man of Iron.

He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a huge dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on the battlefield of Gravelotte, in his high black, pewter-buttoned military frock and white peaked Cuirassier cap, riding cords, and great black jack-boots with long steel spurs. He was powdered with dust as a man newly come off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had driven in a carriage from Ferriéres. Upon the step below him stood Count Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, and débonnaire, wearing, as did Bismarck-Böhlen, the semi-military Foreign Office undress. The lean trap-jawed personage in a dark uniform with velvet facings, whom we must recognize as the Intendant General, waited in the background, glaring through his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame Potier, who stood beside her mistress as ready to spit and scratch for her sake as a pussy cat to defend its young.

There was no pause. The dominating figure stepped into the hall. His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the threshold. He touched the peak of his cap with his bare right hand, and said, looking down from his great height upon the women:

"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"

One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl, dropped him a stiff little middle-class reverence. Behind her, the other bobbed a serving woman's curtsy. He went on, addressing White Shawl as the superior:

"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official residence of the Prussian Foreign Office. We shall pay you an adequate sum for our accommodation, and remain here some weeks ... possibly three."

He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of sardonic humor playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the corners of the deeply cut mouth that was masked by the heavy iron-gray mustache:

"Though the actual duration of the visit depends—not upon ourselves—but upon the decision of the United German Powers, and the position which they shall decide to take up with regard to Conditions of Peace. We are not the invited guests of France, whose stay can be cut short because our manners do not prepossess our hostess. We came because we thought it advisable ... we will go when it is convenient to depart!"

"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said Bismarck-Böhlen, grinning.

"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he did at Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words, 'Forfeiture of Territory,' drew from them so many patriotic tears...."

"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left glove, "and Wimpffen was a posturer, with his 'Moi, soldat de l'Armée Français'—and the Duke of FitzJames is a manufacturer of bugaboos.... Our German caricaturists should draw him as a pavement artist, holding the hat beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk picture of our atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."

LXIV

We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of August a town of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered about the ancient château that sheltered the boyhood of the great Turenne. Bazeilles had not observed the Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant. The village had formed the extreme right of the French position on the day of the Battle of Sedan. Lebrun's Corps had occupied it, and its inhabitants had been seized with the fighting fever, and had helped to hold back a Bavarian Division for nearly six hours. Elderly civilians armed with antiquated rifles had displayed desperate bravery. One old woman, possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is said to have shot down three of the enemy. The men, their women and children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined brickbats. The grim lesson had been taught very thoroughly. Bazeilles served as an object-lesson on Prussian methods throughout the remainder of the War.

"I will remember Bazeilles!" had flashed through the young head that was swaddled in white woolen. "My friend shall not forget to tell me what was done there!"

But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the door of the billiard room. She saw it summarily thrown open. He went in, followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen at their heels.

"Capital!" he said to them. "We will have this arranged as a Bureau for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries, and the cipherers. What is this?" He went to the glass door that led into the winter garden, looked through, and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here after dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"

The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of white woolen understood but little German, as she had previously said to her absent comrade. But what slight lore she had in the abhorred tongue had been gained in conversation with a Prussian mistress. She found that, thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what he said.

His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room, that apartment destined to become famous in history as the seat of the various negotiations which led to the treaties with the States of South Germany, the proclamation of the King of Prussia as German Emperor, and later, to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the settlement of the Conditions of Peace. The simply furnished, medium-sized room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in handsomely wrought ormolu. Upon a little table against the wall stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a bronze figure with fiendish attributes, which engaged his attention curiously. His great laugh burst out, as he contemplated the grotesque.

"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement, "if that malignant little demon be a model of the guardian spirit of the Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane will be of opinion that I have come to the right shop!"

The young men laughed at the jest uproariously. He joined them, crushing down their lighter merriment with a mirthful giant's thunderous "Ha, ha!..." Then the double doors of the drawing-room opened. He came out with his followers into the hall place, demanding of little Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was laid on in the rooms above:

"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in your habits, even down to the bourgeoisie and peasantry of France. At home, I am accustomed to go to bed with a candle, and blow it out when I get between the sheets. But here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"

"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled White Shawl.

"So!" He looked down from his great height upon the speaker. She caught up a box of matches from the hall table and thrust it into Madame Potier's shaking hand....

"Go up quickly. Light the gas in the bedrooms. Monseigneur wishes to examine them all!" She added in her shrill voice: "They are in use at the moment, but can be vacated and got ready for the occupation of Monseigneur in something less than half an hour!" She broke off to shriek to the ascending Madame Potier.... "Quicker, Jeannette! Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!... But I come myself!..." And with a halting, shuffling gait which made Count Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even the polished Hatzfeldt put up his eyeglass, she jerked across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and mounted the gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.

What virtue lies in contrasts! When Juliette de Bayard walked, you learned what poetry could be in simple motion. Her skirts had a rhythmic swing and flow. Those little feet of hers made twenty steps to the stride of an ordinary English girl. At Mass, when folded in her white School veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though upborne on waves of buoyant ether. Watching her, you would have said that thus Our Lady must have glided onward, bearing the gracious burden of her Divine Child.

This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white shawl what the men who sneered at her dimly felt must be a countenance ugly to repulsiveness, had one shoulder thrust upward and forward, reaching nearly to the ear on that side.... A palpable curvature of the spine caused the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and torturing to the ear.

"Do not laugh.... It is pitiable rather than ridiculous," she heard her enemy say, in his own tongue.

Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette with the pride of the comedian who has made an effective exit.... To be pitied by him, and for a second time! That liquid flame that circulated through her veins, illuminated her brain in its every cell and convolution. By its lurid light she saw her own intention in all its ugliness. Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny? Had she sought for her vengeance? Of his own will had he not come, this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting for him?

And Breagh. What of her promise to her comrade? The thought was a knife-keen stab compelling a shriek. She stifled it in the folds of the shawl, bent down her head, and with an exaggeration of the grotesque gait, scuttled upstairs with the agility of an escaping spider, provoking a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the well-bred Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy. Let him laugh! As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets leaped up flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce hand, like little Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale articles of feminine attire and use were caught up and thrust into a small portmanteau, she bade him laugh as much as he would. As she opened a cupboard by the chimney-piece where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics, and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed chemist's vial, and thrust it within her dress, deep into her bosom, she told herself that France should laugh before long!

Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in the hall at the foot of the stair. When she descended, he went up with Hatzfeldt and Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a brief inspection of the rooms. His own choice was made with the least delay possible. Opening from the square, skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was a room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by one window on the right side of the main front, looking toward the stables, and commanding a view of the pleasance and shrubbery from two more windows in the eastward wall. This apartment, which was partly above the dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles Tessier, the Minister appropriated to his own use. A second room, communicating with this, and looking on the pleasance, and boasting also a glass window door leading out upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory on the south side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.

A somewhat better-furnished room looking upon the Rue de Provence would serve, as would the drawing-room upon the ground floor, for the reception of strangers and guests. Privy Councilor Abeken would occupy the bedroom next to this, also with an outlook upon the Rue de Provence. A tiny cell near the back stairs, only big enough to hold a bed, chest of drawers, and washstand, was set apart for Secretary Bolsing. Upon the second floor Dr. Busch or Privy Councilor Bucher would occupy the best bedroom, the two Prussian body servants from the Wilhelm-Strasse sleeping in the attic overhead. The two remaining chambers on the second floor—small, angular, ill-ventilated places—the women of the house were free to move into, and retain, if they desired. "Only in that case," said the masterful voice, "they must contribute their services toward keeping the house in order. Where I live, there must be no idlers. That is understood!"

Below in the hall, White Shawl and Madame Potier heard his strong laugh echoing amid the empty chambers and his heavy stride shaking the rafters above their heads.

"I am pleased with my room, though it has a window opening toward the stables, where the detachment of troops supplying the sentries will be quartered for the present, with my orderly and coachman and the two grooms. But common sights do not annoy me, any more than common noises, and there are two other windows overlooking the park. The trees in their autumn coloring will remind me of my own woodlands at home. Altogether the place has been chosen intelligently. A more roomy and better-furnished house might afford spiteful people an excuse to accuse the Chancellor of the Confederated States of luxury—the love of which has never been a besetting sin of mine. True, I must have a table supplied well, punctually, and generously.... That is always an understood thing. A sine qua non, in fact.... The King is quite aware of this.... I told him again yesterday, ... 'Sire, I must be fed properly if I am to make proper terms of peace!'"

His great laugh sounded again as he came trampling downstairs, bringing with him a masculine perfume of Russian leather and cigars of super-excellent quality. And Hatzfeldt was saying in his languid, well-bred accents:

"With Your Excellency's permission, I will now take leave of you—I must go and see the place where I am quartered. It is at No. 25, Avenue St. Cloud."

"So, then.... A pretty good distance from the Chancellor of the Confederation, should he require at some unusual hour the services of his First Secretary.... You will have to find the Count more convenient lodgings." The Minister turned to the Intendant General, who barked:

"At Your Excellency's honorable orders, the change shall be immediately made!"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, not to-night!" expostulated Hatzfeldt, with graceful peevishness. "I am horribly done up with the heat and the dust we had on our way here. Why should the King have dragged us to Choissy-le-Roi, in order to see the troops? Cannot he see troops every hour of his existence? Ah, by the way! Did Your Excellency notice that at Villeneuve St. George the bridge of boats had been blown up?"

The Minister shrugged:

"Who can understand this destructive mania? It is a national disease peculiar to the French. Since the beginning of the war, they have destroyed bridges and railways to the tune of millions—for the sheer pleasure, one would suppose, of building them up again. Well, good night!" He held out his hand pleasantly to Hatzfeldt. "Good night to you, Herr Intendant General!"

The Intendant saluted stiffly and barked in his peculiar style:

"I wish a very good night to Your Excellency!" Then he clanked down the steps after Hatzfeldt and over the gravel walk to the front gate.

"I know what Count Paul has it in his mind to do," chuckled Bismarck-Böhlen, looking after them. "He will take a bath and dine at the Hôtel des Réservoirs."

"It would not be a bad plan to follow his example," said the Minister, "since some of the Foreign Office fourgons may be late in getting here. Unless Madame Tessier is prepared to supply us with a dinner upon the spur of the call?"

He added:

"Come, shut the hall door. I see they have already placed sentries. The grooms and Niederstedt will bring in the luggage by the back door and up the servants' staircase." He continued as Bismarck-Böhlen obeyed: "They are particular about such matters in French houses, where there is so much wax polishing of the floors and woodwork. Where are the women? ... There were two. A bonne and her mistress, the proprietress...." His powerful glance fell upon them standing near the doorway of the dining-room. He motioned them to enter, and followed them in.

"Madame Tessier!" he began, taking as by right the chair at the head of the long shining dinner table, upon which the tapestry cloth had not yet been replaced. He looked at White Shawl. The shrill voice cackled:

"Madame Tessier is in Belgium.... I am Madame Charles Tessier, the wife of Monsieur, her son!"

He said in his excellent French, laying on the table the flat white Cuirassier cap he had removed on entering:

"I congratulate M. Tessier! Can your servant cook, Madame?"

The shrill voice responded:

"Monseigneur must be judge of that when he has tried her dishes. She does her best—the excellent Jeannette! But if Monseigneur is to be served as befits his state and consequence ... I should prefer to cook for him myself!"

"So!" He leaned one elbow on the table, meditatively regarding the speaker, and the lambent blue flame of humor danced and flickered in his eyes: "Since we do not require you and your domestic to leave the house—only to confine yourselves to the two smaller bedrooms on the second floor—it may be as well that you should assist to a degree in the kitchen.... But for all that does not require women we have our servants—you understand? And the chef attached to the service of the Prussian Chancellery is extremely competent. He is—rather a personage in his way!"

Bismarck-Böhlen sniggered in his characteristic fashion.

White Shawl shrilled, gesticulating with a hand that resembled a claw:

"If your Prussian cooks better than I do—or even the chef of our gredin of an Emperor, he may call me a Bonapartist and I will not slap his face!"

The Minister drew his well-shaped sunbrowned hand over his mustache, perhaps to hide a smile at the epithet. He asked with his powerful glance intent upon Madame Charles Tessier:

"So, then, you are not a lover of the Bonapartes? What is your party? Are you Republican or Monarchist?"

She shrieked with raucous energy:

"I am a patriot, and a citizeness of the French Republic! All my life I have execrated the Bonapartes. See you well—I do not love Prussians!... But you have humiliated and dethroned this sacred pig of a Napoleon.... And for that I could kiss the hand that received his sword!"

The person to whom the shrill tirade was addressed listened with imperturbability, although Bismarck-Böhlen, standing on the other side of the table, between the windows, involuntarily clapped his hands to his sorely sacrificed ears.

Now the Minister said in his suavest French accents:

"The hand was not mine, Madame, I beg to assure you, but that of the King of Prussia, who is hardly likely to pay us a visit here.... Should His Majesty elect to do so, your ambition may be partially gratified. You will see the monarch who has paid your Imperial bugbear so thoroughly well in his own coin."

Here Bismarck-Böhlen broke in.... "Excellency! ... talking of coin ... you told me to remind you of what happened the other day...."

"Ah, so I did!" said he. "It is a mere coincidence, but worth remembering.... Upon leaving the weaver's hovel, near the village of Donchery, outside which you and Leverstrom waited while I discussed the terms of the capitulation with Napoleon in a garret containing a table, a bed, and two rush-bottomed chairs, the French Emperor presented five pieces of gold to the weaver, which Leverstrom afterward told me he vainly endeavored to buy of the man. His stupidity or the weaver's, we will not say now which was the greater!... But the coins displayed in unbroken sequence—the portraits of five rulers of France. There was Napoleon I., imperially wreathed, on a fine fat piece of 1820; a Louis XVIII., inane and aristocratic; a Charles X., with the knob in his nose; a Louis Philippe, looking like a bourgeois, and Napoleon III., Emperor of Ready-Made Plebiscites...." He broke off to say: "And now, Madame, what news of this dinner? Can you supply it, or must we go elsewhere? Decide. I am always an economist of time!"

And the penetrating glance shaded by the shaggy eyebrows of the Minister questioned the meager peaked countenance of which merely a wedge showed between the curtaining folds of the white shawl.... Lover of good cheer as he was, he was perhaps asking himself whether a creature so mean and pinched-looking could set before him the nourishing, well-flavored, well-cooked dishes, calculated to restore energy to his giant's frame. She was studying the face revealed in the circle of light cast downward by the shaded lamps of the gasalier above the dinner table, half loathing, half fascinated by the tremendous personality now revealed.

How much the published portraits of the man lacked, she realized now, clearly. What mental and physical power, and force, and energy were indicated in the lines of the great domed skull and the astonishing frontal development. What audacious courage and ironic humor were in the regard of the full blue eyes that rested lightly upon her own insignificance.... What deeply cut, pugnacious nostrils he had; what a long stern upper lip the full gray mustache curtained! He had a cleft in his chin that reminded her of a friend she loved....

This last and the other characteristics of the visage that confronted her were fuel to her roaring furnace of hate. A baleful light blazed in the eyes she curtained from him. Her heart seemed a goblet brimmed with intoxicating, poisoned wine. And then a little thing tamed the snake in her. It drew in its quivering, forked tongue, covered the fangs that oozed with venom, lowered its hooded head, and sank down, palpitating among its cold and scaly coils.

With all its power, the profound weariness of his face had suddenly come home to and arrested her. He looked, as was indeed the fact, like a man who had not known a good night's rest for weeks. There were sagging pouches of exhaustion under the masterful eyes, and the lines about the forehead and mouth and jaws were deeply trenched with fatigue and anxiety. With pain, too, for he was suffering from facial neuralgia brought on by nervous strain and overexposure, and divers galls and blisters, the result of days spent in the saddle by an elderly heavy-weight. Now he yawned and leaned back in his creaking chair, and suddenly was no despot helmed with terrors, armed with power, mantled with ruthlessness, but a man fagged out, and tired and hungry, athirst for rest and the comforts of home.

He had a wife living, she knew, and sons serving in the Prussian Army. Perhaps he had a daughter who loved him, too.... Perhaps she was thinking of him ... praying for his return in safety.... Oh, God!... The dreadful thought was not to be tolerated.... It must be driven away ... banished from the mind, if one was to carry out the plan....

All these thoughts volted through the brain under the white shawl in the passing of an instant. The next, she heard the shrill voice say:

"It is for Monseigneur to decide!... There is no difficulty about dinner—that is, provided Monseigneur can eat a good soup of artichokes made with cream!..."

His startlingly blue eyes laughed. He acquiesced, seeming to snuff the air with his deeply cut nostrils.

"There is nothing better than puree of artichokes—provided it serves as the prelude to a solid, sustaining, and well-cooked meal."

White Shawl shrilled:

"There might follow a six-pound trout, boiled, with sauce à la Tartare.... One came in this afternoon, fresh to a miracle, a fish from the Gauche near Montreuil."

He said to Bismarck-Böhlen:

"The trout of the Cauche are capital eating ... especially those caught in the upper part of the stream, a mile below Parenty. What else, Madame?"

She proclaimed in the raucous voice that made Bismarck-Böhlen grimace and shudder:

"A dish of cutlets and a ragoût of partridges with little cabbages. It is now upon the fire, simmering in the casserole—I meant it for next day!"

Like the trout, it had been designed for P. C. Breagh's delectation.

She added:

"And there are a cold ham, a peach tart, and a jelly of Maraschino, and I could toss up a savory omelette to follow the sweet dishes. As for dessert ... we have pears and plums from the garden.... But, Monseigneur..." It was greed that made the woman's strange eyes glitter so intolerably—"I shall be well paid for the excellent food and all my trouble, shall I not, Monseigneur? ... In good French money—not in Prussian notes?"

Under the heavy mustache he showed his sound, even teeth in a laugh of enjoyment.

"In good French money. You have my promise. So—you do not like our Prussian notes?"

White Shawl screamed:

"They are good where they come from, it may be, Monseigneur!... But here—the people would as soon take dead leaves for pay!..."

He thrust his hand in his breeches pocket, pulled out a gold Napoleon, and threw it ringing on the shining table. Her eyes snapped. The little clawlike hand darted from the folds of the enveloping white shawl and pounced on the gold piece. She curtsied like an elder-pith puppet to the great figure sitting at the table head, and with the extraordinary gait that combined a hitch, twist, and shuffle, hobbled out of the room, shrilling as the door closed behind her:

"Jeannette! Jeannette! Monseigneur will dine here! Make you up the kitchen fire! I will go myself to the cellar and get the fruit.... And the wine ... Monseigneur will certainly require some wine! Later on you must help me get ready the bedrooms. Put out sheets and pillow cases to air!"

Bismarck-Böhlen was saying, as he followed his great relative into the drawing-room, and extended himself upon the green plush sofa, as the Minister selected the largest armchair, and lighted one of his huge cigars:

"What a woman! What a voice!"

The other laughed through the fragrant smoke rings:

"You could say no more and no less of an operatic diva, had you recently fallen a victim to her charms. My landlady pleases me. My tastes, as you know, are somewhat peculiar.... But you need not feel anxious on the Countess's behalf. My sentiments in this instance are highly platonic." He added, smoking and speaking almost dreamily: "If in cookery Madame's performance equals her promise, what with trout, and partridges aux petit choux—cold ham to fall back on, and a savory omelette, we ought not to do badly at all!... With half a dozen bottles of that champagne we brought from Rheims, and a little of the Epernay..."

He added, yawning and stretching his great limbs: "I am not usually poetical, but I have a fancy with regard to the deep blue, green-fleshed grapes of the country, that their color affects the river into which the hillside vineyards drain. The Marne water is as brilliant and green as though it were made of melted emeralds. And the must from those grapes yields the best champagne of Rheims and Epernay...." He yawned again and went on: "There is something in surroundings! In this house I feel that I can work comfortably. The view of old trees, and bushes and flower beds from the room I have chosen as a bedroom and study will make one feel almost at home. Two of my servants shall sleep upstairs in the attics—of which there are several, and my coachman Niederstedt—who was my porter at the Wilhelm Strasse, shall have a shakedown somewhere belowstairs. He is as strong as Goliath and as sharp as a needle. An unusual combination of qualities, because giants are supposed by little people to be dull-witted and easily taken in!"

He sent out a long column of fragrant blue vapor, and added, looking at the antique bronze clock surmounted by its grotesque bat-winged shape: "A fallacy, since I myself belong to the family of the Anakim. Do you observe that my landlady's familiar spirit appears to be winking at what I have just said?... Kobold or gnome, there is a family resemblance between his countenance and Madame's. I must get her to sell him to me, to carry home to Berlin."

LXV

P. C. Breagh had gone back to his bedroom at the gardener's cottage, under the garret where had slumbered the unlucky Jean Jacques Potier. The pet rabbits of the young man were even now in a hutch in the stable yard, and his striped house jacket and the green baize apron he used to wear when cleaning the Tessier silver hung on a hook in Madame Potier's closet, with the civil integuments of M. Potier, now deceased.

It was too early to go to bed. He pulled off jacket and waistcoat, filled and lighted the venerable briar root, and, sitting on his bed, re-perused by the light of his tallow candle a letter in headings, and bearing the date of September 23rd, which may be reproduced as written, here:

288 GREAT CORAM STREET, LONDON, W.C.

"MY DEAR YOUNG MAN!

I WAS SURPRISED AND GRATIFIED

To Receive Letters dated respectively July 28th, 31st, August 4th, 11th, 26th, Sept. 5th, 19th, from:

ONE WHO HAD VANISHED SWALLOWED ALIVE BY THE ROARING WHIRLPOOL OF WAR. THEY ARE SLAP-UP AND NO MISTAKE! ROBUST TO BRUTALITY! THEY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED PUBLISHED AND PAID FOR! BY THREE SUBURBAN EDITORS SIMULTANEOUSLY. A NEW IDEA LONG CHERISHED BY SOLOMON KNEWBIT. A MAN BORN BEFORE HIS AGE! THE BOSS OF A FLEET ST. WEEKLY IS NOW NIBBLING AT 'BANG! A DOG'S TALE.' I Have Recovered My Fifteen Shiners And Have Cash in Hand For My Young Swell WHEN HE COMES MARCHING HOME! MARIA SAYS YOU HAD BETTER LOOK SHARP!

AN IMPORTANT CLUE DISCOVERED! MYSTERY OF LOST FORTUNE ABOUT TO BE CLEARED UP! ABSCONDING TRUSTEE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ECCENTRIC LODGER BY THE LANDLADY! PROOFS IN A SEALSKIN WAISTCOAT! BE READY! AT ANY MOMENT THE SUMMONS MAY COME!

I remain, My dear young man, Truly and faithfully yours, SOLOMON KNEWBIT."

At the bottom of the last page was written in a curious up-and-down handwriting:

"Dr mr Breagh,

"yu kno How mr Knewbit Has a Way of Puting Things queer but it Wold be Best For you To Come Home it Realy Wold. There Is a Pore Siner only Wating To maik Amens wich Is Mind must alwais Have Bean weak and People Puting There Afares in the Hands of sutch a Trustea Can ixpect Nothing but Truble, mr Chown of Furnival's Inn is To Be let kno If He Gives Warning to Leeve the House wich i think never will Drink being got Hold of him to sutch an xtent dear mr Breagh you have thought you were Pore. But your Fortune of 7,000 lbs was only took awai by the Almighty Goodness to Be Given back again, trust and beleive. I am Dr mr Breagh,

"Respectfully and afexnly "Maria Ling."

P. C. Breagh folded up the pregnant pages—owing to Mr. Knewbit's professional predilection for capitals and spacings, the double letter covered a good number—and put them away and began to think.

Would it not be best that Juliette should return to her husband in Belgium, since M. Tessier gave no sign of returning? And whether she agreed with the notion of leaving Versailles or not, was it wise of P. C. Breagh to stay?

He loved her. He would love her always. There were times when her eyes had tenderness in them for him. Those unforgettable days passed together ... those strange and dreadful sights seen in common, those perils mutually encountered had made a bond between them that might never be broken now.

But was it wise to remain near her, breathing her atmosphere, drinking in her rare, delicate, exquisite beauty, and growing more besotted in his worship of it with every day? He knew that it was not. By the anguish the mere thought of leaving her cost him, he realized how deeply the love of Juliette Tessier had taken root in his heart.

His nature, as simple as hers was complex, made it easy to hold her blameless in all. She had not led him on. They had been flung together by force of circumstances. That there was something guileful in her very guilelessness never suggested itself to Breagh.

The gate bell pealed as he sat ruminating, causing him nearly to leap out of his skin. That M. Tessier had returned was the possibility that instantly suggested itself. He knelt by the window of the low-ceiled cottage chamber and leaned out into the deepening dusk.

German voices at the gate, the stamping of horses, and the clinking of bridles.... The grinding of heavy boots on gravel, the jingle of spurs and the sound of scabbards scraping against the ground, rapping against the steps. A pause and a voice he knew said clearly and resonantly:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble. I will interview the people of the house myself!"

A loud voice barked out something unintelligible to the listener, ending with "insolence." The voice of the Man of Iron returned:

"In that case, my Excellency will take the risk. There are only women in the house, and, should they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here."

If there were any further words, the listener missed them, so deafeningly loud was the drumming of the blood in his ears.... The door was opened. There was a gleam of something white in the dusky hail place. And He entered and the other men followed him.... What did they there? What was it best to do?...

Now one by one the upper rooms were illuminated. The house door was opening. Two men came out and descended the steps. One who walked lightly and hummed a tune between the whiffs of his cigar passed away, still humming, toward the Avenue St. Cloud. The second who trailed a clanking sword gave harsh-voiced orders in the staccato tone of Prussian military authority to some persons in the street outside, mounted a charger held by an orderly, and rode jingling away toward the Boulevard de la Reine. His helmet and his orderly's could be seen bobbing over the top of the wall that screened the Tessier house from the Rue de Provence, and the dark silhouettes of the heads and bodies of men who crowded the double box seats of two private luggage vans that waited beyond the porte cochère under an escort of cavalry. No doubt they were fourgons sacred to the traveling Foreign Office of the Minister, bearing, besides the material of diplomatic labor, a working staff of Chancery clerks. Other vehicles were waiting, and videttes of cavalry were posted at each end of the quiet street. The trampling of their horses could be heard distinctly, with certain gruff admonitions, presumably addressed to pedestrians desirous of using the thoroughfare.

Now the leaves of the porte cochère were being opened and hooked back by the dusky silhouettes of a couple of men. Liveried grooms, because of stray gleams of light flashed back from buttons and cockades. Light thrown by the blazing yellow lamps of a large, empty, traveling landau that rolled in under the lozenged archway, at the heels of a splendid pair. The horses smelt of dust and sweat, and whinnied as they whiffed the stables. They were driven by a huge coachman, and a second carriage followed, piled with luggage, and containing three persons, who might have been secretaries or body servants, one could not decide. Four led horses followed, guided by orderlies of Cuirassiers. These did not follow the carriages, as they turned up the short avenue and pulled up at the hall door. The orderlies, quite as though they knew the place, rode down the longer gravel drive that ended at the gates of the stable yard. One trooper got down and opened the gates, and the eager horses were conducted in.

Tramp, tramp, tramp!...

A detachment of infantry, marching down the Rue de Provence. Turning in under the archway of the carriage entrance, an eighth company belonging to a regiment impossible to specify, because of the enfolding, deepening dusk. They also smelt hot and dusty and tallowy. A subaltern was in command of them, and an under officer. They halted, marked time while they posted a sentry at each of the gates, then tramped on toward the gardener's cottage, and turned into the Tessier stable yard. They were going to bivouac there. It was all clear and plain and simple. It was as fascinating as a shadow play—but for the tragic element that mingled in. Now the servants and grooms were unloading the luggage from the carriages and marvelously deft and noiseless they seemed at the work. A little later—and both carriages turned from the house, and were driven into the stable yard. You could hear the grooms and the big coachman hissing as they unharnessed the weary horses, and the horses snorting recognition as they scented their stable mates. And then P. C. Breagh became aware that the venerable pair of ponies that drew Madame Tessier's basket carriage were not to be permitted to remain in their comfortable loose boxes.... He could hear the elderly man who groomed and fed and exercised the ponies vainly protesting at the summary eviction of his charges, and the officer who commanded the detachment of infantry—Green Rifles, as it turned out—answering his complaints:

"Find the beasts another stable, and the rent and forage will be paid for. But remember!—if you grumble, His Excellency will have you shot!"

And the ponies were led away in search of new quarters, as the Foreign Office fourgon, with its escort of Uhlans, ground over the trampled gravel and pulled up at the terrace steps. One could hear the voice of Madame Potier and the creaking of the Venetian shutters. Then the billiard-room windows threw broad stripes of light across the terrace toward the wall. They were going to carry in the dispatch boxes and light traveling safes, the copying presses and letter books and the rest of the Foreign Office impedimenta by way of the long windows.... One guessed whose idea that had been.

A dominating, transforming spirit had invaded the quiet house in the Rue de Provence, bringing with it this purposeful, orderly bustle, this disciplined irruption of elements strange and new.

Of all these servants and attendants, some would certainly take up their abode at the gardener's cottage. Would P. C. Breagh, like the Tessier ponies, be presently turned out to seek cover elsewhere?

And Juliette.... The thought of her roused all his stinging apprehensions. He told himself that presently, when the house should have resumed something of its normal quiet, he would steal across the lawn in the shadow of the trees and borders, and lie in wait for a glance ... for a word....

He would force her to leave at once for Belgium. She must not remain in the house with all these men.... The time crept by with maddening slowness as he waited. Dark shadows moved in lighted rooms, passing across the blinded windows.... The whole house was flaring with gaslight now.

How long.... The slatted Venetian shutters of the dining-room were now unbarred and thrown open. He could not see into the room by reason that it faced east toward the pleasance, while the window from which he watched looked southward, immediately commanding the hall door. But broad beams of light were thrown down the steps and across the grass plot. Tall shadows moved across the streaks at intervals. There was the clatter of china, glass, and cutlery, a smell of cooking delectably savory. The Man of Iron was dining, and Hate had spread the board.

A shudder went through Breagh, and a cold perspiration bathed him. His hair seemed to rise and stiffen upon his creeping scalp. A sound broke from him ... perhaps a groan, perhaps an exclamation. There was a soft step in the darkness under his window and a whisper like a sigh.

"Monsieur Breagh.... Do not descend! It will be better that I mount the stairs to you!"

His first impulse was to reassume the discarded coat and waistcoat. Then he remembered that it was dark. The floor creaked under his stealthy footsteps as he reached the landing and crept on stockinged feet down the narrow stairway. She had pushed back the unlatched door and passed into the tiny passage. He met her almost on the threshold, felt for and seized her little hands. How feverishly hot they were! He pressed them as he whispered:

"I guessed what had happened!... I know who has come here!... For hours I have been waiting my chance to get a word alone with you. I was just coming when I heard you under the window!"

She whispered—and, although her hands burned in his, they trembled and her teeth chattered:

"Monseigneur de Bismarck desired to dine here. Every day one does not entertain a guest so noble. See you well! I have cooked for Monseigneur with my own hands a dinner worthy of—himself! He has devoured like an ogre the trout à la sauce Tartare, and the cutlets, and is now engaged upon a ragoût of partridges. When it is time to fry the savory omelette that follows, Madame Potier will ring the little bell, and I shall run back to the house."

The sentence ended in a stifled titter. An ugly sound that sickened Breagh as he heard it. He pressed the small hands, whispering entreatingly:

"Don't laugh! You must not laugh. Go back and get what you need for a journey. Tell Madame Potier I am taking you to Belgium. Back to your husband! ... your place is where he is! You shall not stay here ... you must not, I forbid you!..."

She ceased to laugh and pulled her hands away from his. Her answer came: an inflexible utterance to be breathed so softly:

"I remain here, Monsieur, until my husband comes!"

He panted the old prayer:

"Juliette, for the love of God...! You don't know what terrible danger you are risking!..."

The reply fanned past his cheek like the velvety wing of some great night moth:

"Monsieur, I remain here, until the arrival of M. Charles Tessier. Although you will do wisely to depart while you may—unseen!"

He said between his gritted teeth, while the pounding of his heart choked him:

"I shall stay here! ... I decline to be sent away!..."

She seemed to cogitate. Then came the mere breath of an utterance.

"Will you swear to be secret and faithful?"

He said hoarsely:

"Juliette, I must first know what you intend to do."

She whispered, and her voice set his blood rushing and the fragrance of her maddened him.

"Stoop!... Why are you so tall? Bend down your head!"

He stooped from his majestic altitude of five feet nine inches and a bittock, and two little hands that scorched him clasped his neck about. Light and soft as the touch of a flower was the contact of the mouth that whispered: