d army of Sedan; and he wore his officer's sword-knot with a
pride far removed from any kind of conceit: in fact, nearly akin to
religious veneration.

As a boy, it had been his bitterest grief that his mother's wishes and
the doctor's opinion were against his becoming a soldier,--an officer
like his dead father, who had fought in the great campaign. His mother
and the doctor had feared that he was too weakly for the military
profession. In order to remove this objection, the boy voluntarily
subjected himself to heroic discipline, and by strictly following a
graduated system of physical exercises inured his body to hardships,
until he was actually found fit for service. Conquered by such
persistent devotion, his mother at last yielded to his wishes; but she
saw him wear his father's familiar old uniform only a few times, for
she died shortly after, barely forty years old.

Bernhard Reimers thus became doubly an orphan. But he had far more than
the death of a mother to deplore. With his mother he also lost the only
person who had loved him, and the only one whom he in return had loved.

So closely was the boy encircled by his mother's love, that the need
which led his schoolfellows at the gymnasium to form friendships was
never felt by him. Whenever he wanted to learn something, to solve a
doubt or to confide a secret, he could count on his mother's
tenderness; she would explain, soothe, or sympathise, as the joys and
sorrows of the growing youth became ever more serious. From this
relation he retained a touch of womanliness in his character, even
after he had left home to enter the regiment: a shrinking from
everything coarse, a reserve before all that was unlovely. This
instinctive feeling did not, indeed, altogether protect him from
temptation, but it withheld him from yielding to excess. He joined in
the little drink and love follies of the other young subalterns from a
sense of comradeship; alone they would never have appealed to him.

As at school, so in the regiment, he had many comrades, but no friend.
He did not trouble himself about this, and until his mother's death he
felt no want. Then he recognised sadly that he was quite alone; but he
was incapable of setting to work to seek a friend, so he just waited
for some happy chance to bring the right person across his path.

When, at last, he found the friendship he sought, it did not come in
the way he had dreamed, suddenly, like a gift from heaven thrown int