lly brilliant. Those patches of color on his cheeks are
signs of fever rather than of health. That woman, Minette, is
responsible for this ruin. It must end badly one way or the other; the
best thing that could happen to him would be to fall in one of these
sorties. He has made himself so conspicuous that he is almost certain to
be shot when the troops take Paris, unless, indeed, he becomes an actual
lunatic before that. Wound up as he is by excitement and enthusiasm he
will never bring himself to sneak off in disguise, as most of the men
who have stirred up this business will do."

The time passed quickly enough in Paris, events followed each other
rapidly, there was scarce a day without fighting, more or less serious.
Gradually the troops wrested position after position from the
Communists, but not without heavy fighting. The army at Versailles had
swelled so rapidly by the arrival of the prisoners from Germany that
even in Paris, where the journals of the Commune endeavored to keep up
the spirits of the defenders by wholesale lying as to the result of the
fighting outside its walls. It was known that at least a hundred
thousand men were now gathered at Versailles.

"There is no doubt of one thing," Cuthbert said, as standing with Mary
on the Trocadero, they one day watched the duel, when the guns at Meudon
were replying vigorously to the fire of the forts, "I must modify my
first opinions as to the courage of the Communists. They have learnt to
fight, and allowing for all the exaggeration and bombast of their
proclamations, they now stand admirably; they have more than once
retaken positions from which they have been driven, and although very
little is said about their losses, I was talking yesterday to a surgeon
in one of the hospitals, and he tells me that already they must be as
great as those throughout the whole of the first siege.

"They are still occasionally subject to panics. For instance, there was
a bad one the other night when the troops took the Chateau of Becon, and
again at Clamart, but I fancy that is owing to the mistake the
Communists made in forcing men who are altogether opposed to them into
their ranks. These men naturally bolt directly they are attacked, and
that causes a panic among the others who would have fought had the rest
stood. Still, altogether, they are fighting infinitely better than
expected, and at Clamart they fought really well in the open for the
first time. Before, I own that