. When we hear the guns, and see the wounded, we know there
has been a fight. Who knows had there been a battle-royal, and was Miss
Newcome having her wounds dressed upstairs?

"You will like to say good-bye to your cousin, I know," Lady Kew
continued, with imperturbable placidity. "Ethel, my dear, here is Mr.
Clive Newcome, who has come to bid us all good-bye." The little girls
came trotting down at this moment, each holding a skirt of their elder
sister. She looked rather pale, but her expression was haughty--almost
fierce.

Clive rose up as she entered, from the sofa by the old Countess's side,
which place she had pointed him to take during the amputation. He rose
up and put his hair back off his face, and said very calmly, "Yes, I'm
come to say good-bye. My holidays are over, and Ridley and I are off for
Rome; good-bye, and God bless you, Ethel."

She gave him her hand and said, "Good-bye, Clive," but her hand did not
return his pressure, and dropped to her side, when he let it go.

Hearing the words good-bye, little Alice burst into a howl, and little
Maude, who was an impetuous little thing, stamped her little red shoes
and said, "It san't be good-bye. Tlive san't go." Alice, roaring, clung
hold of Clive's trousers. He took them up gaily, each on an arm, as he
had done a hundred times, and tossed the children on to his shoulders,
where they used to like to pull his yellow mustachios. He kissed the
little hands and faces, and a moment after was gone.

"Qu'as-tu?" says M. de Florac, meeting him going over the bridge to his
own hotel. "Qu'as-tu, mon petit Claive? Est-ce qu'on vient de t'arracher
une dent?"

"C'est ca," says Clive, and walked into the Hotel de France. "Hulloh!
J. J.! Ridley!" he sang out. "Order the trap out and let's be off."
"I thought we were not to march till to-morrow," says J. J., divining
perhaps that some catastrophe had occurred. Indeed, Mr. Clive was going
a day sooner than he had intended. He woke at Fribourg the next morning.
It was the grand old cathedral he looked at, not Baden of the pine-clad
hills, of the pretty walks and the lime-tree avenues. Not Baden, the
prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair. The crowds and the music, the
gambling-tables and the cadaverous croupiers and chinking gold, were far
out of sight and hearing. There was one window in the Hotel de Hollande
that he thought of, how a fair arm used to open it in the early morning,
how the muslin curtain in the morning air