id, bending forward to shake hands with his visitor in the English
fashion. 'There may possibly be some trifling difficulties at the
outset. The first step in any undertaking usually costs something, but
you will not, I beg, permit yourself to be drawn into,--ahem, any
shallow quarrels. Our friends of the Guard, you will understand, are a
little prone to pick up even a careless word on the sword-point.'

M. Selpdorf paused, and referred once more to the memorandum.

'There has been some small hitch about the pay on the frontier of late?'
he asked innocently.

'A serious hitch for the last eighteen months or so, your Excellency,'
replied Rallywood with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

'Indeed? That must be remedied. The paymaster-General shall have a note
upon your affair immediately, Captain Rallywood. Good-night.'

Rallywood stepped out into the windy, frozen night, and also out of his
old life into the new. Above him the stars, written in their vast, vague
characters upon the night-blue vault of sky, shone with a keen lustre.
Below his feet, with scarce a break in the great circle, it seemed as if
they drew together in denser clusters and set themselves in luminous
tiers. These latter were the lights of the city. For the Hotel du
Chancelier stands high upon one of the twin ridges which form the ravine
of the river, and upon whose converging slopes Revonde is built.
Rallywood stood and looked down upon the dip and rise of the terraced
city with a new interest, for now it held a future for him individually,
a future which must be stirring and might be something more.

The eyes of the girl whose glove he had trodden upon still challenged
him from the starlit darkness, eyes made of starlit darkness themselves.
He followed the broad black line of the river between its sweeping
curves of lamps, broadening out seawards into hazy dimness. Then as a
great bell across the water boomed out the hour he turned his gaze to
the east, in the direction of the sound, to where the broken brightness
of the crowding streets gave place to a majestic alignment of light and
shadow, showing the position of the Ducal Palace upon the river bank.
Behind and above it shone a blood-red gleam like an angry eye; this
Rallywood knew to be the great stained dome of the historic mess-room of
the Guard.

Then the late lieutenant of the Frontier Cavalry laughed aloud in the
dark, his blood tingled in his veins, for the priceless element of a