Friday forenoon, and there were many holiday-keepers hastening
to trains. At the corner of one of the main thoroughfares a crowd
partly blocked the road. The cause of it became apparent to us when the
head and arched neck of a black charger appeared, and then the white
plume and polished cuirass of a Life Guardsman. We stood on a
door-step, so that Bella might see the troop.

As they passed before us, with that stately bearing of man and horse
which has always seemed to me peculiar to the Life Guards, and the sun
flashed in dazzling gleams from breasts and helmets, I glanced at my
friend Naranovitsch. His soldierlike form was drawn up to its full
height, while the flashing eye, flushed countenance, distended nostrils,
and compressed but slightly smiling lips told, I thought, of a strong
feeling of martial joy. Doubtless he was thinking at the moment of his
own regiment, to which he had been but recently appointed, and of his
comrades-in-arms.

"Fine-looking fellows!" I whispered.

"Splendid! glorious!" he said, in a deep, low voice.

Bella looked quickly up at him, displaying an anxious, sorrowing face,
and bright eyes, dimmed with ill-suppressed tears.

"You are not ill, Bella?" he whispered, bending down with a look of
tenderness, not unmixed with surprise.

"No; oh, no," she replied, in a low tone; "but the sight of the Guards
has made me very sad."

I knew full well the cause of her emotion, but the crowded street was
not a suitable place for explanation.

"Come, follow me," I said, and walked quickly along in the direction of
the Strand, where I turned abruptly into one of those quiet courts which
form, as it were, harbours of refuge from the rattle and turmoil of the
great city. Here, sauntering slowly round the quiet precincts of the
court, with the roar of the street subdued to a murmur like that of a
distant cataract, Bella told Nicholas, in tones of the deepest pathos,
how a German lady, Elsie Goeben, one of her dearest friends, had been
married to the handsomest and best of men in one of the Prussian cavalry
regiments. How, only six months after their union, the Franco-Prussian
war broke out, and Elsie's husband Wilhelm was sent with his regiment to
the frontier; how in many engagements he had distinguished himself; and
how, at last, he was mortally wounded during one of the sorties at the
siege of Metz.

"They did not find him till next day," continued my sister, "for he had
fallen in a p