iting to Charles," said Desiree to D'Arragon, when they reached
the drawing-room, and, crossing to her own table, she set the papers in
order there. These consisted of a number of letters from her husband,
read and re-read, it would appear. And the answer to them, a clean sheet
of paper bearing only the date and address, lay beneath her hand.

"The courier leaves this evening," she said, with a queer ring of
anxiety in her voice, as if she feared that for some reason or another
she ran the risk of failing to despatch her letter. She glanced at the
clock, and stood, pen in hand, thinking of what she should write.

"May I enclose a line?" asked Louis. "It is not wise, perhaps, for me
to address to him a letter--since I am on the other side. It is a small
matter of a heritage which he and I divide. I have placed some money in
a Dantzig bank for him. He may require it when he returns."

"Then you do not correspond with Charles?" said Mathilde, clearing a
space for him on the larger table, and setting before him ink and pens
and paper.

"Thank you, Mademoiselle," he said, glancing at her with that light
of interest in his dark eyes which she had ignited once before by a
question on the only occasion that they had met. He seemed to detect
that she was more interested in him than her indifferent manner would
appear to indicate. "No, I am a bad correspondent. If Charles and I,
in our present circumstances, were to write to each other it could only
lead to intrigue, for which I have no taste and Charles no capacity."

"You seem to hint that Charles might have such a taste then," she said,
with her quiet smile, as she moved away leaving him to write.

"Charles has probably found out by this time," he answered with the
bluntness which he claimed as a prerogative of his calling and nation,
"that a soldier of Napoleon's who intrigues will make a better career
than one who merely fights."

He took up his pen and wrote with the absorption of one who has but
little time and knows exactly what to say. By chance he glanced towards
Desiree, who sat at her own table near the window. She was stroking
her cheek with the feather of her pen, looking with puzzled eyes at the
blank paper before her. Each time D'Arragon dipped his pen he glanced at
her, watching her. And Mathilde, with her needlework, watched them both.

CHAPTER XII. FROM BORODINO.

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

War is the gambling of