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Children, I think I hear the carriages coming; you must not make Lady Hesketh wait." "I have half a mind to stay," said Molly Hesketh. Sir Thorald said she might if she wanted to enlist, and they all tried to smile, but the sickly gray of early morning, sombre, threatening, fell on faces haggard with foreboding young faces, too, lighted by the pale flames of the candles.
He had been lying there for an hour thinking about Lorraine and wondering whether she would ever be told what her exact relation to the Marquis de Nesville was, when a maid brought him two letters, postmarked Paris. One he saw at a glance was from his sister, and, like a brother, he opened the other first. "DEAR JACK, I am very unhappy. Sir Thorald has gone off to St.
Rickerl looked pleased; perspiration stood on his blond eyebrows and his broad face glowed. "As an officer of cavalry in the Prussian army," he said, "and as an attaché of the German Embassy in Paris, I suggest that we return to first principles and rejoin our base of supplies." "He's thirsty," said Molly, gravely. "Row, Ricky!" urged Sir Thorald; "they will leave nothing for Uhlan foragers!"
But Sir Thorald had been dead for an hour. When Alixe entered Jack took her slim, childish hands and looked into her eyes. She understood and went to her dead, laying down her tired little head on the sheeted breast.
When Madame de Morteyn wrote to Sir Thorald and Lady Hesketh on the first of July, she asked them to chaperon her two nieces and some other pretty girls in the American colony whom they might wish to bring, for a month, to Morteyn. "The devil!" said Sir Thorald when he read the letter; "am I to pick out the girls, Molly?"
Yes, he could read between the lines a man in love is less dense than when in his normal state and he was sorry for Molly Hesketh. He thought of Sir Thorald as Archibald Grahame had described him, standing amid a shower of bricks and bursting shells, staring at war through a monocle. "He's a beast," thought Jack, "but a plucky one. If he goes to Cologne he's worse than a beast."
I cannot bear to leave you, but it must be done, for your sake and for the sake of France." She answered: "Yes, it must be done. I shall go with you." "You cannot," he said; "there is danger in the forest." "You are going?" "Yes." They said nothing more for a moment or two. He was thinking of Alixe and her love for Sir Thorald. Who would have thought it could have turned out so?
A vision of little Alixe came before him, blond, tearful, gazing trustingly at Sir Thorald's drooping mustache. It made him angry; he wished, for a moment, that he had Sir Thorald by the neck. This train of thought led him to think of Rickerl, and from Rickerl he naturally came to the 11th Uhlans.
Molly Hesketh kissed her, wishing that she could pinch her; and so they left, tearful, anxious, to be driven to Courtenay, and whirled from there across the Rhine to Cologne. Sir Thorald and Lady Hesketh lingered on the terrace after the others had returned to the breakfast-room. "Thorald," she said, "you are a brute!" "Eh?" cried Sir Thorald. "You're a brute!"
"I think I see him now," said Sir Thorald "no, it's Bosquet's boy from the post-office. Those are telegrams he's got." The little postman's son came trotting across the meadow, waving two blue envelopes. "Monsieur le Capitaine Rickerl von Elster and Monsieur Jack Marche two telegrams this instant from Paris, messieurs! I salute you."
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