and I met him last night at the Offi cers' Club. If you can bring yourself to like anything German, you may like him."

Marie gave the gentlemen their coffee that afternoon, and sat in one of the window recesses while the two warriors fought their battle over again. He was a tall, spare-built man, this cavalry-captain Karl Sponnogel, and the girl noticed how his hair was thickly snowed with gray and his face furrowed with the deep vertical lines that a noble suffering leaves. He had a gentle voice and manner, and that and the pathos of the empty sleeve pinned over his chest almost lulled to sleep the girl's wakeful resentment.

"Has Captain Genlis described the fight to you, Mademoiselle?" said the Rittmeister, turning after some time to Marie.

Now of Mars-le-Tour Jules had not spoken often to his sister, and she had not trusted herself to ask him much. So she got up from the window and came and stood by the little table on which the Rittmeister set out the battle with matches and the coffee-cups.

"Here you have Metz and Bazaine's ariny corps," he explained, "and that cup shall stand for Macmahon farther north. Orders came to us from headquarters to hinder at all costs for one hour Bazaine's concentration on Machahon. At the end of the hour our main body would have come up and the concentration would have been rendered impracticable. There was nothing to do but hurl our cavalry at the French troops moving out northwards from Metz. The Uhlans and Bismarck's 7th Kürassiers-my old regiment-were told off to charge them. It was a pretty desperate business: one against-how many?-thirty or forty perhaps, and the bare half of us came out of it."

"It was magnificent!" cried the Hus sard of the Guard. "People compare

it to that charge of the English Light Brigade, but that was a mistake, and there was no mistake here. It was superb!"

"We had nothing else to do," said the Rittmeister simply. "I myself was with some of the more lucky ones who got through two lines of the French, and I was close by Smettow, twenty yards, I should say, when he gave the order to retire. And that was a curious thing, Mademoiselle. Graf Smettow, who led the charge, turned to his trumpeter and called to him, with something strange in his voice that was not a groan, and not a sob and not an oath, and yet was all three, to sound the retreat. Binkebank-the man's name put the trumpet to his lips but the brass had been riddled with shot, and all he could get out of it was a faint and melancholy wail. At that moment my arm was shot through and my horse came down on me. And when I dragged myself up on my unwounded arm, Binkebank had slung his trumpet behind him and the comrades were away."

"I could not have been far from you," said Captain Genlis, "for I heard Smettow's order and that trumpet-wail which seemed to me like a call from the bank of the Styx. A big Kürassier had just given me this"-he touched lightly the zig-zag on his face -"and I could not yet know whether I was of the living or the dead. The thin piping had something so unearthly in it that I half imagined that I had got down to the shores of the fabled river and that the wail was the signal to the old ferryman of the dead. You remember that passage of Virgil? Yes? Well, I had not read it for years, but it all came back to me then. I was one of the great multitude that stand waiting their turn on the shores of the river of death: 'thick as the leaves that fall gliding to earth at autumn's first touch of frost: thick as the

birds swarm to land,'-and there was Charon putting his barge across the dark water."

"How did you get among our people?" asked the Rittmeister.

"My horse bolted with me," said the French gentleman. "I was blinded and dazed and had to go with him where he would. So I found myself among your white Kürassier uniforms; some of them vibrating round me, others under foot. Everywhere snow and red blood, I dreamed."

"And you heard Smettow's order and that thin call of Binkebank's?" observed the other. "You must have been very close to them."

"I suppose so," said Captain Genlis. "A few yards, probably the same distance as yourself."

"What else do you remember at the moment?" asked the Rittmeister. "I have a curious thought in my mind."

"I remember a great white-uniformed figure down on me," said the hussard. "A great white arm lifted, a sabre-flash that split the sky like the lightning. But I got in my revolver just between that flash and the blow. Then the world went to twilight, and that is the end of distinct memory."

"Shall we call divided honors, Captain Genlis?" cried the Rittmeister at this point, stretching out his hand across the table.

"How do you mean?" asked the Captain bewildered.

"Don't you see?" said Sponnagel. "We were exactly at the same spot, and—”

The French gentleman burst into a laugh, and wrung the outstretched hand.

"Who would have thought that we should ever meet again?" he cried. "Is it not extraordinary, Marie?"

The two soldiers had been so carried away by their subject that they had forgotten the girl standing there at the table. Now that they looked up at LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2292

her, they saw that her cheeks and lips were white, and that her hand was resting heavily upon the back of her brother's chair.

"You are not well, Mademoiselle?" cried Sponnagel, starting up. "How could we talk of such horrible things before you! Will you not sit down?"

Without turning her eyes to him, Marie said that she was indeed not well, and would go to her own room. She would not let her brother come with her, and so she left the two gentlemen and appeared no more that afternoon.

But when the Rittmeister had gone away, late in the evening-for the two had talked on and on of sieges and battles, ancient and modern, and of saddles and of reductions in the weight of accoutrements, and of other things that lie close to a soldier's heart -Marie came to her brother in the salon, pale as she had left him, but with those fires burning at her eyes.

"Jules," she said slowly, "this Prussian-this Rittmeister Sponnagel-did he give you your wound?"

"I should think so," answered her brother carelessly. "And are you better now? What was the matter with you? A soldier's sister should not go faint at soldier's talk."

"It was not that at all," she answered, “and I was not faint. Oh, I am girlish, I know, and foolish, perhaps, but not as you think. Jules, never ask me to see this man again."

"Yes, indeed," he cried, “you are right to say that you are girlish. Do you want to make me ridiculous, Marie? What difference is it to us that it was he more than any one else that gave me this cut? And what of his arm? Does that count for nothing with you?"

"I cannot see him, Jules," was all she said.

"You can be reasonable, little sister," he answered. "You will always

hate the poor man, I suppose, because he disfigured your brother. But that came in the open give-and-take, and if war brought nothing but wounds, Marie, it would be robbed of half its terrors. You must remember that the Rittmeister only did his duty, and you must never let him see that ill-will you bear him."

corner of the Friedhof, the memory of the fine skill with which the captives had rolled cigarettes between the strokes of billiards, and the presence, which seemed likely to become permanent, of Captain and Mademoiselle Genlis.

For only a few days before Captain Genlis would have been at liberty to

The acquaintance between the two men, so dramatically begun and so strangely renewed, ripened into friendship, and the tall Prussian gentleman, about whom his civilian costume still hung rather loosely, was a frequent guest in the salon of Captain Genlis. Marie's eyes were always hard for the Rittmeister, though her manner was composed and courteous. And the Rittmeister, striving vainly by much quiet kindness and gentleness to bring back the soft light that should surely be in the eyes of this French girl, for whom, exiled and melancholy, his whole soul went out in compassion, came gradually to set all his hope and happiness in that softening. But it came neither with the hours nor the days nor the months: for Marie would hear nothing but the shriek of the sabre cutting down through the air on to her brother's cheek. She would not see the Kürassier, with beads of agony on his forehead, raising himself on his unshattered arm to look over the frosted field of Mars-le-Tour to Binkebank blowing that unearthly call and "the comrades away": and the pathos of the Rittmeister's loosely clinging clothes and armless sleeve had no more voice for her.

Peace had been declared, and the shabby French uniforms had melted away from the city streets and the town lanes. Nothing remained in Behnsleben of the prisoners of war but the headstones in their allotted

form and depart for France, disquieting symptoms of paralysis had made their appearance. It would seem that the sabre-cut of Mars-le-Tour had gone a trifle, only a millimetre it may be, deeper than was suspected, and that some delicate hair-spring of the human machine had been jarred. So the long and tiresome journey was postponed again and again, until at last it was apparent that Captain Jules Genlis would never take it, but from Behnsleben would some day set out on the journey that is longer still but less tiresome.

Captain Genlis accepted the situation with serenity. He was glad, he said, to be spared the necessity of trying the nerves of his Parisian acquaintances with the contemplation of that Turk's Head of his. He had himself transported to rooms a little above the town, where from his couch he could see out across that green and silver plain to the great cone of the Brocken. For men will always look upwards in their perplexed hours, and many before the old Psalmist and after him, godly and ungodly, have got their help from the hills. Captain Genlis found contentment in the constant society of his sister and the Rittmeister Sponnagel, and in the visits of other friends; his fortitude and courtesy were always up to the level of his suffering, and he would not allow his long dying to distress his neighbors more than it distressed himself.

During those five years the Ritt

into the eyes of Mademoiselle Genlis. She accepted his constant presence because it was her brother's wish, and for the same reason when the Prussian gentleman was sitting with Jules she left the house to walk in the fields or the lanes, for she avoided the town. But the hiss of the Rittmeister's sabre was ever in her ears, poisoning her life. For all her wrestling with God she could not find that impulse to toleration and forgiveness that came, without prayer, to her brother. She accepted with stifleddown resentment the kindnesses that were showered on her by her friendly neighbors. And the Rittmeister, look ing into the cold steel of her eyes often wished passionately that some Angel of Destiny had hewn off his swordarm at the shoulder before his blade came down on that face rising up at him white from the red haze of battle.

The day arrived when Captain Jules Genulis went down to that dark river: and this time the ferryman was ready for him, because his turn had come. What was left of him on this side of Styx they clothed in the old tarnished uniform of the Hussards of the Guard and carried to the prisoners' corner of the Friedhof. Marie refused the offer that was made of a military escort.

The Rittmeister went to the house that evening. She received him in the room where Jules had listened so long for the foot of Death upon the stair. His couch was still there, with its dark-green coverlet, his reading-stand, his books, his chessboard set out. The windows were open towards the Brocken, from whence his help had come. The hour, everything, should have spoken to Marie of peace and forgiveness. But the hiss of the sabre was in her ear and set mountains between herself and the Rittmeister. And he looked at the soft lines of her slight figure and at the gray strands

about his soul: and his heart went out to her in love and pity. But he saw then the drawn lines of her mouth and the hardness of her eyes: and with that he saw the barrier that was always between them.

"Mademoiselle," he said, this friend of the house, "will you tell me what you are going to do now? Do you think you will return to France?”

She looked at him almost in surprise.

"To France?" she asked coldly. "To leave Jules here, alone, Herr Rittmeister? In Prussia?”

"You would leave him with friends." She drew herself up.

"I am only a woman," she answered, "and perhaps in this I shall seem to you not so very womanly. But I, at any rate, do not accept Prussian friendship."

"Jules-Captain Genlis," he said with a sigh, "was not so bitter against us."

"And I," she exclaimed, all the smothered-down resentment of years shooting up of a sudden into angry flames, "I hate it all. You do not know how I hate it all! I hate Behnsleben! I hate your patronizing women! I hate your God! Oh, how I hate your God, your merciless, crushing divinity, cold and formal as your churchesyour God of Victory!"

"Germany, too, has her orphans and widows," said Sponnagel sadly.

Vic

"Yes, but the orphans and widows of conquerors, Herr Rittmeister. tory is a salve for all wounds. We have none of that wonderful salve. We have only the memory of blunders and defeats and treachery, nothing to honor but our dead."

"We would honor your dead, too," he said. "Why did you not let us?"

"You mean, why did I refuse the military escort. Herr Rittmeister?" she replied. "Oh, you will say, I know,

or you will think that it is a womanish view, girlish and petty; but I believe that if it is not the view of more than myself, France is indeed lost. I will accept no favors, no compliments from Germany, till justice has been done. Give us back our provinces: give us back Alsace and Lorraine-and then send escorts for our dead."

"Mademoiselle Genlis," he said at length, breaking in desperately on રી dragging, painful silence, "if you must stay on here, if you will not leave Jules alone with us, will you let me continue to be what I have perhaps been to you in these years? I loved your brother Jules, and if—"

"Herr Rittmeister," she interrupted coldly, "there is Mars-le-Tour."

"Mars-le-Tour brought us together and kept us together, Jules and me," he exclaimed passionately.

"Mars-le-Tour is between us, you and me," she said.

"No, no!" he cried. "No, that must not be. Marie-Mademoiselle Genlis, cannot you see? I would to God any other hand but mine had done it; but what were we, he and I? Pieces on the board of war that must move and strike and be struck. I could no more help it than"

He stopped, not so quickly but she had carried on his thought and glanced involuntarily at the empty sleeve. But that was only just, she insisted to herself: was Prussia then to pay no price at all for victory after victory? And no softening came into her eyes.

"I will tell you," he said, rising, "what it was in my heart to say to you. I love you, Marie: that was all. You knew it: I can see it in your eyes. But I am a Prussian: I can read that reproach, too, in your eyes."

"It could never be, Herr Rittmeister," she said. She had risen, too. and was as pale as he.

"Will Mars-le-Tour always be between us?"

Marie knew herself in that moment. She was conscious that the walls she had raised around her heart were only to be maintained by the painful and constant beating back of the nobler impulses that would have torn them down. The Rittmeister was a Prussian: there was Mars-le-Tour: there were the wrongs of France: there were the lost provinces: but it was by desperate force of will alone that she could bring herself to say, yes, almost to think, "I do not love him."

His step went down the stair. It was as if Death were leaving the house for a second time.

"I do not love him," she persisted in the teeth of her soul.

The door closed behind him, and his slow tread died into the night upon her straining ear.

"I love him not!"

And she burst into tears.

Another five years passed, and the Rittmeister came back to Behnsleben. He had been offered such employment as a man without a bridle-arm can undertake, and had travelled far. But into the sweltering depths of the Cameroon forests, up to the Great Wall of China, he had carried with him the image of the solitary, resentful French girl. The horseman for all his skill cannot be rid of Black Care: but Love rides pillion, and sits the steed yet more tenaciously.

So he came home one summer day and went to her house. She was not there. They told him he would be sure to find her at the Friedhof: she went to that prisoners' corner every day.

He followed her to the Friedhof, and