The Red Cross Barge

oss half of which, amid the remains of a delicious dessert a large-

and almost empty liqueur-bottles-signs of the pleasant ending to the best dinner the five young

to be filled with the pale golden shadows of an August night. A few moments ago the Herr Commandant had loudly called for a lamp, and Madame Blanc, owner of the

light, and, although he was himself smoking a pipe, the fu

nd there was a further reason for this unlikeness. The Herr Doktor, Max Keller by name, was from Weimar; the young officers now round him were Prussians of the Junker class. They were quite civil to the Herr Doktor-in fact t

spectacles. His present companions, more fortunate than he, had been born into the 'nature-eye' cycle of German oculistic research. Not one of them wore spe

much-of what it brings with it. He had been, if not exactly in, then what he secretly thought far worse, close to, the battle of Charleroi, and for the ten

s, was over, secretly irritated the Herr Doktor. He knew the limitless extent to which they were to be envied. And that knowledge made him hopelessly out of touch with them-out of touch as he could never be with the arrogant by-his-mother-spoilt lieutenant, his Highness Prince Egon von Witgenstein, whose arrival in the luxurious motor ambulance now standing just outside in the courty

at his pipe, the Herr Doktor's mind, his dreamy, sensitive, imag

etermination to write an account of all that had taken place to his Government. But when he had been told, in language of careful, cold, calculated brutality, that at the slight

uré of Valoise was an old, white-haired man, and at first he had behaved with considerable dignity-with far more dignity, for

within one hour?' he had exclaimed, and then, in answer to a natural, if sharply uttered question-'No, I cannot-I will not-tell you where these dying men are! All I can say is that they are well within the limits of the town.' To accede to his request had been, of course, out of the question; and to the Herr

where a large windowless fruit and tool house, standing isolated in the mi

up all one side of the Grande Place. The Tournebride, so the Commandant informed the Herr Doktor, had been noted among gay Parisians, in the days of peace which