hillock,
every crag, every height had its group of tiny dark dots or its
solitary Uhlan.

Very far away I heard cannon--so far away that the hum of the
cannonade was no louder than the panting of our horses on the white
hill-road, and I could hear it only when the carriage stopped at
intervals.

"Do we take the railroad at Saverne?" I asked at last. "Is there a
railroad there?"

[Illustration: "EVERY BRIDGE WAS GUARDED"]

Buckhurst looked up at me. "It is rather strange that a French
officer should not know the railroads in his own country," he said.

I was silent. I was not the only officer whose shame was his
ignorance of the country he had sworn to defend. Long before the
war broke out, every German regimental officer, commissioned and
non-commissioned, carried a better map of France than could be
found in France itself. And the French government had issued to us
a few wretched charts of Germany, badly printed, full of gross
errors, one or two maps to a regiment, and a few scattered about
among the corps headquarters--among officers who did not even know the
general topography of their own side of the Rhine.

"Is there a railroad at Saverne?" I repeated, sullenly.

"You will take a train at Strasbourg," replied Buckhurst.

"And then?"

"And then you go to Avricourt," he said. "I suppose at least you
know where that is?"

"It is on the route to Paris," said I, keeping my temper. "Are we
going direct to Paris?"

"Madame de Vassart desires to go there," he said, glancing at her
with a sort of sneaking deference which he now assumed in her
presence.

"It is true," said the Countess, turning to me. "I wish to rest for
a little while before I go to Point Paradise. I am curiously tired of
poverty, Monsieur Scarlett," she added, and held out her shabby gloves
with a gesture of despair; "I am reduced to very little--I have
scarcely anything left,... and I am weak enough to long for the scent
of the winter violets on the boulevards."

With a faint smile she touched the bright hair above her brow, where
the wind had flung a gleaming tendril over her black veil.

As I looked at her, I marvelled that she had found it possible to
forsake all that was fair and lovely in life, to dare ignore caste, to
deliberately face ridicule and insult and the scornful anger of her
own kind, for the sake of the filthy scum festering in the sinkholes
of the world.

There are brave priests who go among lepers, there are brave