; "yet I am not
free altogether, my body is, but I shall leave my heart behind me."

"Oh, that will never do," said Alice, with more vivacity than he quite
liked: "you will want your heart. You could never be a heartless man I
am quite sure," and she looked archly at the handsome young fellow as she
said it, and smiled so provokingly.

"It is true however," he said, but in such a melancholy way, that Alice
felt sure something serious was coming.

"If I might only leave my heart with you," he added, "I should be quite
content to go away without it."

"But what on earth should I do with it?" she said, purposely disregarding
the sentimental, and sticking to the literal meaning of his words.

"Keep it close to your own," was his reply.

"Then should I be queen of hearts indeed!"

"You are that already to me."

It was time, she thought, to put a stop to this; so, after riding on a
little further, Alice said very demurely, "I thought, sir, you were more
in jest than earnest, but, at all events, I am altogether in earnest when
I say, that you must never repeat to me what you uttered just now. I
wish always to regard you as a friend--a friend found under circumstances
of deep interest to my brother and myself--but nothing more; never
anything more! Let us join the others."

And she turned her horse's head, and met her brother and Tournier, her
face slightly flushed; while Villemet rode after her much more disturbed
than ever he had been when charging a whole battery of guns.

They too had been talking together as they followed the others along the
familiar road that passed by the barracks. It was on the old subject
that Tournier seemed never to weary of.

"There," he said, pointing to the spot where he had first met Cosin,
"that is where I first set eyes on your sunny English face. I remember
it by that blighted tree in the hedge-row. I often thought, when I
passed it afterwards, that it was exactly like me at that time--half-dead
for want of God--fungus everywhere."

Then, as they passed the barracks, he said, "Stop a moment, Cosin. Look
at that gate yonder. How well I remember coming out of that gate in an
awful state of mind--nearly mad--determined, as a last resource, to see
if you, or anybody, really believed in God; and I found you did, for you
lived as if you did. And then began those blessed years of teaching, not
so much by words as by example, which have made me a happy man, though,
God knows, a