rying, and I felt rather surprised.

"'So you are frightened?' I said to her.

"'No, but when I saw you kiss your husband, I thought of mine, of all
whom I love.'

"She continued to sob, but stopping suddenly, she said to me in broken
words and in a low voice:

"'Have you any children?'

"A shiver rare over me, for I guessed that this poor woman had some. She
asked me to look in a pocketbook which was in her bosom, and in it I saw
two photographs of quite young children, a boy and a girl, with those
kind, gentle, chubby faces that German children have. In it there were
also two locks of light hair and a letter in a large, childish hand, and
beginning with German words which meant:

"'My dear little mother.

"'I could not restrain my tears, my dear friend, and so I untied her, and
without venturing to look at the face of my poor dead husband, who was
not to be avenged, I went with her as far as the inn. She is free; I have
just left her, and she kissed me with tears. I am going upstairs to my
husband; come as soon as possible, my dear friend, to look for our two
bodies.'"

I set off with all speed, and when I arrived there was a Prussian patrol
at the cottage; and when I asked what it all meant, I was told that there
was a captain of francs-tireurs and his wife inside, both dead. I gave
their names; they saw that I knew them, and I begged to be allowed to
arrange their funeral.

"Somebody has already undertaken it," was the reply. "Go in if you wish
to, as you know them. You can settle about their funeral with their
friend."

I went in. The captain and his wife were lying side by side on a bed, and
were covered by a sheet. I raised it, and saw that the woman had
inflicted a similar wound in her throat to that from which her husband
had died.

At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping, the woman who had
been mentioned to me as their best friend. It was the lancer's wife.

THE PRISONERS

There was not a sound in the forest save the indistinct, fluttering sound
of the snow falling on the trees. It had been snowing since noon; a
little fine snow, that covered the branches as with frozen moss, and
spread a silvery covering over the dead leaves in the ditches, and
covered the roads with a white, yielding carpet, and made still more
intense the boundless silence of this ocean of trees.

Before the door of the forester's dwelling a young woman, her arms bare
to the elbow, was chopping wood w