r an emperor."

"I have taken harder service than that."

"Of necessity?"

"Yes, madame."

She was silent.

"Would it amuse you to hear what I have been?" I said, smiling.

"That is not the word," she said, quietly. "To hear of hardship
helps one to understand the world."

The cannonade had been growing so loud again that it was with
difficulty that we could make ourselves audible to each other. The jar
of the discharges began to dislodge bits of glass and little
triangular pieces of plaster, and the solid walls of the tower shook
till even the mirror began to sway and the tarnished gilt sconces to
quiver in their sockets.

"I wish you were not in Morsbronn," I said.

"I feel safer here in my own house than I should at La Trappe," she
replied.

She was probably thinking of the dead Uhlan and of poor Bazard;
perhaps of the wretched exposure of Buckhurst--the man she had trusted
and who had proved to be a swindler, and a murderous one at that.

Suddenly a shell fell into the court-yard opposite, bursting
immediately in a cloud of gravel which rained against our turret like
hail.

Stunned for an instant, the Countess stood there motionless, her face
turned towards the window. I struggled to sit upright.

She looked calmly at me; the color came back into her face, and in
spite of my remonstrance she walked to the window, closed the heavy
outside shutters and the blinds. As she was fastening them I heard the
whizzing quaver of another shell, the racket of its explosion, the
crash of plaster.

[Illustration: "A COMPANY OF TURCOS CAME UP"]

"Where is the safest place for us to stay?" she asked. Her voice was
perfectly steady.

"In the cellar. I beg you to go at once."

Bang! a shell blew up in a shower of slates and knocked a chimney into
a heap of bricks.

"Do you insist on staying by that loop-hole?" she asked, without a
quiver in her voice.

"Yes, I do," said I. "Will you go to the cellar?"

"No," she said, shortly.

I saw her walk toward the rear of the room, hesitate, sink down by the
edge of the bed and lay her face in the pillow.

Two shells burst with deafening reports in the street; the young
Countess covered her face with both hands. Shell after shell came
howling, whistling, whizzing into the village; the two hussars had
disappeared, but a company of Turcos came up on a run and began to dig
a trench across the street a hundred yards west of our turret.

How they made the picks and sh