nsleben
muttered, "In the name of God," and poor, brave Kamecke,
shuddering as he thought of his Westphalians and the cul-de-sac
where he had sent them on the 6th day of August, sighed and
looked out into deepening twilight.

Outside a Saxon infantry band began to play a masterpiece of
Beethoven. It seemed to be the signal for breaking up, and the
Red Prince, with abrupt deference, turned to Madame de Morteyn,
who gave the signal and rose. The Red Prince stepped back as the
old vicomte gave his wife a trembling arm. Then he bowed where he
stood, clothed in his tight, blood-red tunic, tall, powerful,
square-jawed, cruel-mouthed, and eyed like a wolf. But his
forehead was fine, broad, and benevolent, and his beard softened
the wicked curve of his lips.

Jack and Lorraine had again dined together in the little gilded
salon above, served by Lorraine's maid and wept over by the old
house-keeper.

The terrified servants scarcely dared to breathe as they crept
through the halls where, "like a flight of devils from hell" the
"Prussian ogres" had settled in the house. They came whimpering
to their mistress, but took courage at the calm, dignified
attitude of the old vicomte, and began to think that these
"children-eating Prussians" might perhaps forego their craving
for one evening. Therefore the chef did his best, encouraged by a
group of hysterical maids who had suddenly become keenly alive to
their own plumpness and possible desirability for ragouts.

The old marquis himself received his unwelcome guests as though
he were receiving travelling strangers, to whom, now that they
were under his roof, faultless hospitality was due, nothing more,
merely the courtesy of a French nobleman to an uninvited guest.

Ah, but the steel was in his heart to the hilt. He, an old
soldier of the Malakoff, of Algeria, the brother in arms of
Changarnier, of Chanzy, he obliged to receive invaders--invaders
belonging to the same nation which had lined the streets of
Berlin so long ago, cringing, whining "Vive l'Empereur!" at the
crack of the thongs of Murat's horsemen!

Yet now it was that he showed himself the chivalrous soldier, the
old colonel of the old regime, the true beau-sabreur of an epoch
dead. And the Red Prince Frederick Charles knew it, and bowed low
as the vicomte left the dining-hall with his gentle, pale-faced
wife on his arm.

Jack, sitting after dinner with Lorraine in the bay-window above,
looked down upon the vast ca