am alive yet, after many others. Obey me and
we will get through the siege of Dantzig, which is only just beginning."

Then suddenly he gave way to anger, and banged his hand down on the
table.

"But, sacred name of thunder, do not make me believe you have eaten when
you have not," he shouted. "Never do that."

Carried away by the importance of this question, he said many things
which cannot be set before the eyes of a generation sensitive to
plainness of speech, and only tolerant of it in suggestions of
impropriety.

"And the patron," he ended abruptly, "how is he?"

"He is not very well," answered Desiree. Which answer did not satisfy
Barlasch, who insisted on taking off his boots, and going upstairs to
see Sebastian.

It was a mere nothing, the invalid said. Such food did not suit him.

"You have been accustomed to live well all your life," answered
Barlasch, looking at him with the puzzled light of a baffled memory in
his eye which always came when he looked at Desiree's father. "One must
see what can be done."

And he went out forthwith to return after an hour and more with a
chicken freshly killed. Desiree did not ask him where he had procured
it. She had given up such inquiries, for Barlasch always confessed quite
bluntly to theft, and she did not know whether to believe him or not.

But the change of diet had no beneficial effect, and the next day
Desiree sent Barlasch to the house of the doctor whose practice lay in
the Frauengasse. He came and shook his head bluntly. For even an old
doctor may be hardened at the end of his life by an orgy, as it were, of
death.

"I could cure him," he said, "if there were no Russians outside the
walls; if I could give him fresh milk and good brandy and strong soup."

But even Barlasch could not find milk in Dantzig. The brandy was
forthcoming, and the fresh meat; the soup Desiree made with her own
hands. Sebastian had not been the same man since the closing of the
roads and the gradual death of his hopes that the Dantzigers would rise
against the soldiers that thronged their streets. At one time it would
have been easy to carry out such a movement, and to throw themselves
and their city upon the mercy of the Russians. But Dantzig awoke to this
possibility too late, when Rapp's iron hand had closed in upon it.
He knew his own strength so well that he treated with a contemptuous
leniency such citizens as were convicted of communicating with the
enemy.

Sebastian