hings should go dreadfully wrong,
you would not be compelled to witness anything unpleasant."

Madame de Morteyn shook her head gently.

"Why speak of it?" she said; "you know I will not go."

"I'll stay, too," said Sir Thorald, eagerly; "Cecil and Molly can
take the children to Paris; Madame de Morteyn, you really should
go also."

She leaned back and shook her head decisively.

"Then you will both come, you and Madame de Morteyn?" urged Lady
Hesketh of the vicomte.

The old man hesitated. His wife smiled. She knew he could not
leave in the face of the enemy; she had been the wife of this old
African campaigner for thirty years, and she knew what she knew.

"Helen--" he began.

"Yes, dear, we will both stay; the city is too hot in July," she
said; "Sir Thorald, some coffee? No more? Betty, you want another
muffin?--they are there by Cecil. Children, I think I hear the
carriages coming; you must not make Lady Hesketh wait."

"I have half a mind to stay," said Molly Hesketh. Sir Thorald
said she might if she wanted to enlist, and they all tried to
smile, but the sickly gray of early morning, sombre, threatening,
fell on faces haggard with foreboding--young faces, too, lighted
by the pale flames of the candles.

Alixe von Elster and Barbara Lisle went first; there were tears
and embraces, and au revoirs and aufwiedersehens.

Little Alixe blanched and trembled when Sir Thorald bent over
her, not entirely unconscious of the havoc his drooping mustache
and cynical eyes had made in her credulous German bosom. Molly
Hesketh kissed her, wishing that she could pinch her; and so they
left, tearful, anxious, to be driven to Courtenay, and whirled
from there across the Rhine to Cologne.

Sir Thorald and Lady Hesketh lingered on the terrace after the
others had returned to the breakfast-room.

"Thorald," she said, "you are a brute!"

"Eh?" cried Sir Thorald.

"You're a brute!"

"Molly, what the deuce is the matter?"

"Nothing--if you ever see her again, I'll tell Ricky."

"I might say the same thing in regard to Ricky, my dear," said
Sir Thorald, mildly.

"It is not true," she said; "I did no damage to him; and you
know--you know down in the depths of your fickle soul that--that--"

"What, my dear?"

"Never mind!" said Molly, sharply; but she crimsoned when he
kissed her, and held tightly to his sleeve.

"Good ged!" thought Sir Thorald; "what a devil I am with women!"

But now the carriages drove up--