to me. I could not keep my
eyes away from it. It got on my nerves--that little gap in the circle;
that little space of white linen, bare of anything but two unfilled
glasses. To me it became as portentous as an unscrewed coffin lid. No
one else seemed to notice it. Cigars had been passed round and the talk
eddied casually back and forth with the twisty smoke wreaths.

An orderly drew the empty chair back with a thump. I think I jumped. A
slender man, whose uniform fitted him as though it had been his skin,
was sitting down beside me. Unlike those who came before him, he had
entered so quietly that I had not sensed his coming. I heard the
soldier call him Excellency; and I heard him tell the soldier not to
give him any soup. We swapped commonplaces, I telling him what my
business there was; and for a little while he plied his knife and fork
busily, making the heavy gold curb chain on his left wrist tinkle
musically.

"I'm rather glad they did not get me this afternoon," he said as though
to make conversation with a stranger. "This is first-rate veal--better
than we usually have here."

"Get you?" I said. "Who wanted to get you?"

"Our friends, the enemy," he answered. "I was in one of our trenches
rather well toward the front, and a shell or two struck just behind me.
I think, from their sound, they were French shells."

This debonair gentleman, as presently transpired, was Colonel von
Scheller, for four years consul to the German Embassy at Washington,
more lately minister for foreign affairs of the kingdom of Saxony, and
now doing staff duty in the ordnance department here at the German
center. He had the sharp brown eyes of a courageous fox terrier, a
mustache that turned up at the ends, and a most beautiful command of the
English language and its American idioms. He hurried along with his
dinner and soon he had caught up with us.

"I suggest," he said, "that we go out on the terrace to drink our
coffee. It is about time for the French to start their evening
benediction, as we call it. They usually quit firing their heavy guns
just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an
hour or two."

So we two took our coffee cups and our cigars in our hands and went out
through a side passage to the terrace, and sat on a little iron bench,
where a shaft of light, from a window of the room we had just quit,
showed a narrow streak of flowering plants beyond the bricked wall and a