w changed! The cheeks were pale and hollow; dark rings--he
could see them but too plainly as the face was lifted up toward the
light--were round those great eyes, bright no longer. Her face was
listless, careworn; looking all the more sad and impassive by the side
of Sabina's, as she pointed smiling and sparkling, up to the fortress;
and seemed trying to interest Marie in it, but in vain.

He called out. He waved his hand wildly, to the amusement of the
officers and peasants who waited by his side; and who, looking first at
his excited face, and then at the two beautiful women, were not long in
making up their minds about him; and had their private jests
accordingly.

They did not see him, but turned away to look at Coblentz; and the
steamer swept by.

Stangrave stamped with rage--upon a Prussian officer's thin boot.

"Ten thousand pardons!"

"You are excused, dear sir, you are excused," says the good-natured
German, with a wicked smile, which raises a blush on Stangrave's cheek.
"Your eyes were dazzled; why not? it is not often that one sees two such
suns together in the same sky. But calm yourself; the boat stops at
Coblentz."

Stangrave could not well call the man of war to account for his
impertinence; he had had his toes half crushed, and had a right to
indemnify himself as he thought fit. And with a hundred more apologies,
Stangrave prepared to dart across the bridge as soon as it was closed.

Alas! after the steamer, as the fates would have it, came lumbering down
one of those monster timber rafts; and it was a full half hour before
Stangrave could get across, having suffered all the while the torments
of Tantalus, as he watched the boat sweep round to the pier, and
discharge its freight, to be scattered whither he knew not. At last he
got across, and went in chase to the nearest hotel: but they were not
there; thence to the next, and the next, till he had hunted half the
hotels in the town; but hunted all in vain.

He is rushing wildly back again, to try if he can obtain any clue at the
steam-boat pier, through the narrow, dirty street at the back of the
Rhine Cavalier, when he is stopped short by a mighty German embrace, and
a German kiss on either cheek, as the kiss of a housemaid's broom; while
a jolly voice shouts in English:--

"Ah, my dear, dear friend! and you would pass me! Whither the hangman so
fast are you running in the mud!"

"My dear Salomon! But let me go, I beseech you; I am in search