Lorraine

The sun of noon was moving towards the west when they remembered that they were hungry.

"You shall come home and lunch with me; will you? Perhaps papa may be there, too," she said. This hope, always renewed with every dawn, always fading with the night, lived eternal in her breast—this hope, that one day she should have her father to herself.

"Will you come?" she asked, shyly.

"Yes. Do you know it will be our first luncheon together?"

"Oh, but you brought me an ice at the dance that evening; don't you remember?"

"Yes, but that was not a supper—I mean a luncheon together—with a table between us and—you know what I mean."

"I don't," she said, smiling dreamily; so he knew that she did.

They hurried a little on the way to the Château, and he laughed at her appetite, which made her laugh, too, only she pretended not to like it.

At the porch she left him to change her gown, and slipped away up-stairs, while he found old Pierre and was dusted and fussed over until he couldn't stand it another moment. Luckily he heard Lorraine calling her maid on the porch, and he went to her at once.

"Papa says you may lunch here—I spoke to him through the key-hole. It is all ready; will you come?"

A serious-minded maid served them with salad and thin bread-and-butter.

"Tea!" exclaimed Jack.

"Isn't that very American?" asked Lorraine, timidly. "I thought you might like it; I understood that all Americans drank tea."

"They do," he said, gravely; "it is a terrible habit—a national vice—but they do."

"Now you are laughing at me!" she cried. "Marianne, please to remove that tea! No, no, I won't leave it—and you can suffer if you wish. And to think that I—"

They were both laughing so that the maid's face grew more serious, and she removed the teapot as though she were bearing some strange and poisonous creature to a deserved doom.

As they sat opposite each other, smiling, a little flurried at finding themselves alone at table together, but eating with the appetites of very young lovers, the warm summer wind, blowing through the open windows, bore to their ears the songs of forest birds. It bore another sound, too; Jack had heard it for the last two hours, or had imagined he heard it—a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat of noon.

Still it was always there; and now, turning his ear to the window, he laid down knife and fork to listen.

"I have also noticed it," said Lorraine, answering his unasked question.

"Do you hear it now?"

"Yes—more distinctly now."

A few moments later Jack leaned back in his chair and listened again.

"Yes," said Lorraine, "it seems to come nearer. What is it?"

"It comes from the southeast. I don't know," he answered.

They rose and walked to the window. She was so near that he breathed the subtle fragrance of her hair, the fresh sweetness of her white gown, that rustled beside him.

"Hark!" whispered Lorraine; "I can almost hear voices in the breezes—the murmur of voices, as if millions of tiny people were calling us from the ends and outer edges of the earth."

"There is a throbbing, too. Do you notice it?"

"Yes—like one's heart at night. Ah, now it comes nearer—oh, nearer! nearer! Oh, what can it be?"

He knew now; he knew that indefinable battle—rumour that steals into the senses long before it is really audible. It is not a sound—not even a vibration; it is an immense foreboding that weights the air with prophecy.

"From the south and east," he repeated; "from the Landesgrenze."

"The frontier?"

"Yes. Hark!"

"I hear."

"From the frontier," he said again. "From the river Lauter and from Wissembourg."

"What is it?" she whispered, close beside him.

"Cannon!"

Yes, it was cannon—they knew it now—cannon throbbing, throbbing, throbbing along the horizon where the crags of the Geisberg echoed the dull thunder and shook it far out across the vineyards of Wissembourg, where the heights of Kapsweyer, resounding, hurled back the echoes to the mountains in the north.

"Why—why does it seem to come nearer?" asked Lorraine.

"Nearer?" He knew it had come nearer, but how could he tell her what that meant?

"It is a battle—is it not?" she asked again.

"Yes, a battle."

She said nothing more, but stood leaning along the wall, her white forehead pressed against the edge of the raised window-sash. Outside, the little birds had grown suddenly silent; there was a stillness that comes before a rain; the leaves on the shrubbery scarcely moved.

And now, nearer and nearer swelled the rumour of battle, undulating, quavering over forest and hill, and the muttering of the cannon grew to a rumble that jarred the air.

As currents in the upper atmosphere shift and settle north, south, east, west, so the tide of sound wavered and drifted, and set westward, flowing nearer and nearer and louder and louder, until the hoarse, crashing tumult, still vague and distant, was cut by the sharper notes of single cannon that spoke out, suddenly impetuous, in the dull din.

The whole Château was awake now; maids, grooms, valets, gardeners, and keepers were gathering outside the iron grille of the park, whispering together and looking out across the fields.

There was nothing to see except pastures and woods, and low-rounded hills crowned with vineyards. Nothing more except a single strangely shaped cloud, sombre, slender at the base, but spreading at the top like a palm.

"I am going up to speak to your father," said Jack, carelessly; "may I?"

Interrupt her father! Lorraine fairly gasped.

"Stay here," he added, with the faintest touch of authority in his tone; and, before she could protest, he had sped away up the staircase and round and round the long circular stairs that led to the single turret.

A little out of breath, he knocked at the door which faced the top step. There was no answer. He rapped again, impatiently. A voice startled him: "Lorraine, I am busy!"