given in marriage as in another city
of the plain.

Peter Koch replaced his snuff-stained handkerchief in the pocket of his
rusty cassock and stood aside. He murmured a few conventional words
of blessing, hard on the heels of stronger exhortations to the waiting
children. And Desiree Sebastian came out into the sunlight--Desiree
Sebastian no more.

That she was destined for the sunlight was clearly written on her face
and in her gay, kind blue eyes. She was tall and straight and slim,
as are English and Polish and Danish girls, and none other in all the
world. But the colouring of her face and hair was more pronounced than
in the fairness of Anglo-Saxon youth. For her hair had a golden tinge in
it, and her skin was of that startlingly milky whiteness which is only
found in those who live round the frozen waters. Her eyes, too, were of
a clearer blue--like the blue of a summer sky over the Baltic sea. The
rosy colour was in her cheeks, her eyes were laughing. This was a bride
who had no misgivings.

On seeing such a happy face returning from the altar the observer might
have concluded that the bride had assuredly attained her desire; that
she had secured a title; that the pre-nuptial settlement had been safely
signed and sealed.

But Desiree had none of these things. It was nearly a hundred years ago.

Her husband must have whispered some laughing comment on Koch, or
another appeal to her quick sense of the humorous, for she looked into
his changing face and gave a low, girlish laugh of amusement as they
descended the steps together into the brilliant sunlight.

Charles Darragon wore one of the countless uniforms that enlivened the
outward world in the great days of the greatest captain that history has
seen. He was unmistakably French--unmistakably a French gentleman, as
rare in 1812 as he is to-day. To judge from his small head and clean-cut
features, fine and mobile; from his graceful carriage and slight limbs,
this man was one of the many bearing names that begin with the fourth
letter of the alphabet since the Terror only.

He was merely a lieutenant in a regiment of Alsatian recruits; but that
went for nothing in the days of the Empire. Three kings in Europe had
begun no farther up the ladder.

The Frauengasse is a short street, made narrow by the terrace that each
house throws outward from its face, each seeking to gain a few inches
on its neighbour. It runs from the Marienkirche to the Frauenthor, and
r