learnt his history.

His name was Matthaus Tina, and Saarbruck his native town, where his
mother was still living. His age was twenty-two, and he had already
risen to the grade of corporal, though he had not long been in the army.
Phyllis used to assert that no such refined or well-educated young man
could have been found in the ranks of the purely English regiments, some
of these foreign soldiers having rather the graceful manner and presence
of our native officers than of our rank and file.

She by degrees learnt from her foreign friend a circumstance about
himself and his comrades which Phyllis would least have expected of the
York Hussars. So far from being as gay as its uniform, the regiment was
pervaded by a dreadful melancholy, a chronic home-sickness, which
depressed many of the men to such an extent that they could hardly attend
to their drill. The worst sufferers were the younger soldiers who had
not been over here long. They hated England and English life; they took
no interest whatever in King George and his island kingdom, and they only
wished to be out of it and never to see it any more. Their bodies were
here, but their hearts and minds were always far away in their dear
fatherland, of which--brave men and stoical as they were in many
ways--they would speak with tears in their eyes. One of the worst of the
sufferers from this home-woe, as he called it in his own tongue, was
Matthaus Tina, whose dreamy musing nature felt the gloom of exile still
more intensely from the fact that he had left a lonely mother at home
with nobody to cheer her.

Though Phyllis, touched by all this, and interested in his history, did
not disdain her soldier's acquaintance, she declined (according to her
own account, at least) to permit the young man to overstep the line of
mere friendship for a long while--as long, indeed, as she considered
herself likely to become the possession of another; though it is probable
that she had lost her heart to Matthaus before she was herself aware. The
stone wall of necessity made anything like intimacy difficult; and he had
never ventured to come, or to ask to come, inside the garden, so that all
their conversation had been overtly conducted across this boundary.

CHAPTER III

But news reached the village from a friend of Phyllis's father concerning
Mr. Humphrey Gould, her remarkably cool and patient betrothed. This
gentleman had been heard to say in Bath that he considered h