r tempting
face, for, visible to his soul, it stood between him and the gloom.

From the distant hall, augmenting his restlessness, came occasional
snatches of music mingled with the hum of voices. The hours passed on
while he tossed nervously on his bed. Then the music stopped. Laughter
and farewells floated up to him. In a few minutes all was silence save
for the footfalls of the sentries on their posts.

Somewhere in its boat of song, the nightingale was floating on the sea
of darkness. Drawn aimlessly by the pathos of the songster's lay, Carter
wandered to the window to gaze out into the moonless midnight. Racking
his quivering heart, his imagination dwelt on a pictured life with
Trusia, emphasizing the sweet moments of her complete surrender.

Time lost all measure in his rhapsody. He might have stood leaning over
the sill a day or a second, when a sound, persistent and murmuring,
haled him back to mundane things. Intermittently, but with growing
volume, from somewhere beyond the wall of black, came the echoes of an
army in passage. He could separate the different noises. That, he
recognized by its deep grumbling noise, was cannon; the rattling sound,
like an empty hay wagon, was caissons, while the muffled, thudding echo
was cavalry at the trot. The force, apparently a heavy one, did not seem
to be coming from Schallberg. He leaned far out of the window
challenging the darkness with his peering eyes. Dimly he could descry
the plateau about the castle with its low bastions at the cliff's edge.
Indefinite shapes pacing along the wall he knew to be Krovitzer
sentries. He fancied he heard a challenge on the distant road, a halt,
then the invisible army took up its march again.

Straining every sense, he concluded that the force was moving from, and
not toward, the frontier. Sutphen, then, for some unknown reason, must
have consented to withdraw part of his none too strong army from points
which Carter believed to be greatly in need of reinforcement. He debated
with himself, therefore, the military necessity of confirming these
impressions. Knowing, however, how prone to offense the plethoric
Colonel could be, and reassured by the fancied challenges, he
relinquished the idea. Growing drowsy with the extra mental exertion, he
divested himself of his clothing and was soon in bed and asleep.

During his slumber another detachment passed, then another, while just
before dawn a heavy force of infantry at double time wen