'Yet it was a sad, sad smile my darling gave me,' thought the girl, as, with her veil closely drawn, she slowly and wearily ascended the great oak staircase to the étage off which her bed-room opened; 'but no doubt he only thought of cheering me.'
Next morning the Countess's carriage took the trio to the Eisenbahnhof for Aix-la-Chapelle; and as Herminia from the swift-speeding train looked back to the sinking spires of Cologne, a curtain seemed to have fallen between her past and present existence.
And oh! how weary was the night that followed, when tossing restlessly, defiantly, and petulantly on her laced pillow, she lay in broken slumber, with tears matting her long and lovely eyelashes.
CHAPTER II.
CHARLIE PIERREPONT.
A week after this, a drochski deposited a smart-looking young officer, in the uniform of the 95th Thuringian regiment—blue with red facings and silver epaulettes, spike-helmet and black belt—at the entrance of the Pariser Hof of Cologne, a comfortable and moderate hotel, suitable to that style of economy continental military men are usually constrained to practise.
Though wearing the well-known uniform of the Prussian army, it was impossible not to recognize in the new arrival, as he sprang lightly up the steps of the hotel, that he was an Englishman, a genuine Briton, for he was the Carl Pierrepont mentioned by young Frankenburg in his letter to the Countess. Carl—or Charlie, as he was known when he was wont to hold his wicket in the playing-grounds of Rugby against the best bowler in the three hundred, and to con his studies in the white brick Tudor school-house, or in the long avenue called Addison's Walk—was a great favourite with all his regiment, and already had the honour of being specially noticed on parade by our Princess Royal when her husband was reviewing the Prussian troops, and of receiving from his hand the much-coveted Iron Cross when almost in his boyhood.
One great cause, perhaps, of Charlie's popularity among the Thuringians was, that as an Englishman he was destitute of that aristocratic hauteur which causes the well-born German officer to regard all under his command as an inferior order of beings, a style of bearing and sentiment unknown alike in the armies of Britain and France.
His face was fair, his features handsome, and he was verging on thirty years of age. His character, like his figure, was fully developed and formed; the expression of his eyes betokened intelligence and promise; while his lithe and manly form had all that muscular strength and activity that women often prefer to intellect in men, and which is frequently the result of the out-door sports in the playgrounds of Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, a portion of our English system of education.
Though the son of a fox-hunting Warwickshire squire, who knew every cover in Stoneleigh, the Brailes, and the Edgehills, the head of an old but certainly embarrassed family, so far as mortgages and so forth went, he was barely deemed among the wohlgeborn, according to the Prussian standard; and poor Charlie had nothing as yet but his epaulettes and sword, his pay as a soldier of Fortune, with the privileges usually accorded to Continental officers, such as going everywhere at half-price in virtue of their being in uniform—privileges which ours would decline 'with thanks.'