The ballroom was brilliantly lighted, the gilded canapés and chairs were covered with officers in every conceivable uniform, lounging, sprawling, chatting, and gesticulating, or pulling papers and maps over the floor. A general traced routes across the map at his feet with the point of a naked sword; an officer of dragoons, squatting on his haunches, followed the movement of the sword-point and chewed an unlighted cigarette. Officers were coming and going constantly, entering by the hallway and leaving through the door-like windows that swung open to the floor. The sinister face of a police-spy peered into the conservatory at intervals, where a slender, pale-faced boy sat, clothed in a colonel's uniform, writing on a carved table. It was the Prince Imperial, back from Saarbrück and his "baptism of fire," back also from the Spicheren and the disaster of Wörth. He was writing to his mother, that unhappy, anxious woman who looked every day from the Tuileries into the streets of a city already clamorous, already sullenly suspicious of its Emperor and Empress.
The boy's face was beautiful. He raised his head and sat silently biting his pen, eyes wandering. Perhaps he was listening to the retreat of Frossard's Corps through the fair province of Lorraine--a province that he should never live to see again. A few months more, a few battles, a few villages in flames, a few cities ravaged, a few thousand corpses piled from the frontier to the Loire--and then, what? Why, an emperor the less and an emperor the more, and a new name for a province--that is all.
His delicate, high-bred face fell; he shaded his sad eyes with one thin hand and wrote again--all that a good son writes to a mother, all that a good soldier writes to a sovereign, all that a good prince writes to an empress.
"Oh, what sad eyes!" whispered Lorraine; "he is too young to see such things."
"He may see worse," said Jack. "Come, shall we walk around the lawn to the dining-room?"
They descended the dark steps, her arm resting lightly on his, and he guided her through a throng of gossiping cavalrymen and hurrying but polite officers towards the western wing of the Château, the trample of the passing army always in their ears.
As he was about to cross the drive, a figure stepped from the shadow of the porte-cochère--a man in a rough tweed suit, who lifted his wide-awake politely and asked Jack if he was not English.
"American," said Jack, guardedly.
The man was apparently much relieved. He made a frank, manly apology for his intrusion, looked appealingly at Lorraine, and said, with a laugh: "The fact is, I'm astray in the wrong camp. I rode out from the Spicheren and got mixed in the roads, and first I knew I fell in with Frossard's Corps, and I can't get away. I thought you were an Englishman; you're American, it seems, and really I may venture to feel that there is hope for me--may I not?"