uses of
friends. Others were silent and still behind their lace curtains, where
there doubtless lurked peeping and criticizing eyes--the house of a
neighbour.

The wedding-guests were few in number. Only one of them had a
distinguished air, and he, like the bridegroom, wore the uniform of
France. He was a small man, somewhat brusque in attitude, as became
a soldier of Italy and Egypt. But he had a pleasant smile and that
affability of manner which many learnt in the first years of the great
Republic. He and Mathilde Sebastian never looked at each other: either
an understanding or a misunderstanding.

The host, Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he
remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention
to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself,
but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a
pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story
was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though
his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite
forbearance. His mind had, it would seem, a trick of thus wandering away
and leaving his body rigid in the last attitude that it had dictated.

Sebastian did not notice that the door was open and all the guests were
waiting for him to lead the way.

"Now, old dreamer," whispered Desiree, with a quick pinch on his arm,
"take the Grafin upstairs to the drawing-room and give her wine. You are
to drink our healths, remember."

"Is there wine?" he asked with a vague smile. "Where has it come from?"

"Like other good things, my father-in-law," replied Charles with his
easy laugh, "it comes from France."

They spoke together thus in confidence, in the language of that same
sunny land. But when Sebastian turned again to the old lady, still
recalling the details of that other wedding, he addressed her in German,
offering his arm with a sudden stiffness of gesture which he seemed to
put on with the change of tongue.

They passed up the low time-worn steps arm-in-arm, and beneath the high
carved doorway, whereon some pious Hanseatic merchant had inscribed
his belief that if God be in the house there is no need of a watchman,
emphasizing his creed by bolts and locks of enormous strength, and bars
to every window.

The servant in her Samland Sunday dress, having shaken her fist at the
children, closed the door behind the last guest, and, so far