l!' Then if he is guilty his face will show it
directly. Then I shall say, 'Comrade, you must marry her whom you have
dishonored.'"

"He will not. He is a libertine, a rascal."

"You are speaking of a man you don't know. He WILL marry her and repair
the wrong he has done."

"Suppose he refuses?"

"Why should he refuse? The girl is not ugly nor old, and if she has done
a folly, he was her partner in it."

"But SUPPOSE he refuses?"

Raynal ground his teeth. "Refuse? If he does, I'll run my sword through
his carcass then and there, and the hussy shall go into a convent."

CHAPTER XXI.

The French army lay before a fortified place near the Rhine, which we
will call Philipsburg.

This army knew Bonaparte by report only; it was commanded by generals of
the old school.

Philipsburg was defended on three sides by the nature of the ground; but
on the side that faced the French line of march there was only a zigzag
wall, pierced, and a low tower or two at each of the salient angles.

There were evidences of a tardy attempt to improve the defences. In
particular there was a large round bastion, about three times the height
of the wall; but the masonry was new, and the very embrasures were not
yet cut.

Young blood was for assaulting these equivocal fortifications at the end
of the day's march that brought the French advanced guard in sight of
the place; but the old generals would not hear of it; the soldiers'
lives must not be flung away assaulting a place that could be reduced in
twenty-one days with mathematical certainty. For at this epoch a siege
was looked on as a process with a certain result, the only problem was
in how many days would the place be taken; and even this they used to
settle to a day or two on paper by arithmetic; so many feet of wall, and
so many guns on the one side; so many guns, so many men, and such and
such a soil to cut the trenches in on the other: result, two figures
varying from fourteen to forty. These two figures represented the
duration of the siege.

For all that, siege arithmetic, right in general, has often been
terribly disturbed by one little incident, that occurs from time to
time; viz., Genius INside. And, indeed, this is one of the sins of
genius; it goes and puts out calculations that have stood the brunt of
years. Archimedes and Todleben were, no doubt, clever men in their way
and good citizens, yet one characteristic of delicate men's minds they
lacked--venerat