CHAPTER II. A CAMPAIGNER.
Not what I am, but what I Do, is my Kingdom.
Desiree had made all her own wedding-clothes. “Her poor little marriage-basket,” she called it. She had even made the cake which was now cut with some ceremony by her father.
“I tremble,” she exclaimed aloud, “to think what it may be like in the middle.”
And Mathilde was the only person there who did not smile at the unconscious admission. The cake was still under discussion, and the Grafin had just admitted that it was almost as good as that other cake which had been consumed in the days of Frederick the Great, when the servant called Desiree from the room.
“It is a soldier,” she said in a whisper at the head of the stairs. “He has a paper in his hand. I know what that means. He is quartered on us.”
Desiree hurried downstairs. In the entrance-hall, a broad-built little man stood awaiting her. He was stout and red, with hair all ragged at the temples, almost white. His eyes were lost behind shaggy eyebrows. His face was made broader by little whiskers stopping short at the level of his ear. He had a snuff-blown complexion, and in the wrinkles of his face the dust of a dozen campaigns seemed to have accumulated.
“Barlasch,” he said curtly, holding out a long strip of blue paper. “Of the Guard. Once a sergeant. Italy, Egypt, the Danube.”
He frowned at Desiree while she read the paper in the dim light that filtered through the twisted bars of the fanlight above the door.