if I had possessed the power, I would have wrought
him no harm, lest by so doing I should bring suffering to her.
Henceforth I must love her as Von Eckhardt professed to do, or was his
protestation mere hyperbole? "As we love the stars--so infinitely above
us, so bright, so remote!"

And yet--and yet--when her eyes met mine as we stood together under the
portico of the Cecil, and again in that hurried moment of farewell at
the station, surely I had seen the love-light in them, "that beautiful
look of love surprised, that makes all women's eyes look the same," when
they look on their beloved.

So, though for one moment I thought I had unravelled the tangle, the
next made it even more complicated than before. Only one thread shone
clear,--the thread of my love.

CHAPTER XII

THE WRECKED TRAIN

I found the usual polyglot crowd assembled at the Friedrichstrasse
station, waiting to board the international express including a number
of Russian officers, one of whom specially attracted my attention. He
was a splendid looking young man, well over six feet in height, but so
finely proportioned that one did not realize his great stature till one
compared him with others--myself, for instance. I stand full six feet in
my socks, but he towered above me. I encountered him first by cannoning
right into him, as I turned from buying some cigarettes. He accepted my
hasty apologies with an abstracted smile and a half salute, and passed
on.

That in itself was sufficiently unusual. An ordinary Russian
officer,--even one of high rank, as this man's uniform showed him to
be,--would certainly have bad-worded me for my clumsiness, and probably
have chosen to regard it as a deliberate insult. Your Russian as a rule
wastes no courtesy on members of his own sex, while his vaunted
politeness to women is of a nature that we Americans consider nothing
less than rank impertinence; and is so superficial, that at the least
thing it will give place to the sheer brutality that is characteristic
of nearly every Russian in uniform. Have I not seen? But pah! I won't
write of horrors, till I have to!

Before I boarded the sleeping car I looked back across the platform, and
saw the tall man returning towards the train, making his way slowly
through the crowd. A somewhat noisy group of officers saluted him as he
passed, and he returned the salute mechanically, with a sort of
preoccupied air.

They looked after him, and one of them shrugged