asing her speed, and had
now entered the Rue de Menil, her shortest way to the Balan gate. It was
nearly nine o'clock, and Sedan no longer wore the forbidding, funereal
aspect of the morning, when it awoke to grope and shudder amid the
despair and gloom of its black fog. The shadows of the houses were
sharply defined upon the pavement in the bright sunlight, the streets
were filled with an excited, anxious throng, through which orderlies and
staff officers were constantly pushing their way at a gallop. The chief
centers of attraction were the straggling soldiers who, even at this
early hour of the day, had begun to stream into the city, minus arms
and equipments, some of them slightly wounded, others in an extreme
condition of nervous excitation, shouting and gesticulating like
lunatics. And yet the place would have had very much its every-day
aspect, had it not been for the tight-closed shutters of the shops, the
lifeless house-fronts, where not a blind was open. Then there was the
cannonade, that never-ceasing cannonade, beneath which earth and rocks,
walls and foundations, even to the very slates upon the roofs, shook and
trembled.

What between the damage that his reputation as a man of bravery and
politeness would inevitably suffer should he desert Henriette in her
time of trouble, and his disinclination to again face the iron hail
on the Bazeilles road, Delaherche was certainly in a very unpleasant
predicament. Just as they reached the Balan gate a bevy of mounted
officers, returning to the city, suddenly came riding up, and they were
parted. There was a dense crowd of people around the gate, waiting for
news. It was all in vain that he ran this way and that, looking for the
young woman in the throng; she must have been beyond the walls by that
time, speeding along the road, and pocketing his gallantry for use on
some future occasion, he said to himself aloud:

"Very well, so much the worse for her; it was too idiotic."

Then the manufacturer strolled about the city, bourgeois-like desirous
to lose no portion of the spectacle, and at the same time tormented by
a constantly increasing feeling of anxiety. How was it all to end?
and would not the city suffer heavily should the army be defeated? The
questions were hard ones to answer; he could not give a satisfactory
solution to the conundrum when so much depended on circumstances, but
none the less he was beginning to feel very uneasy for his factory and
house in