"Pray tell the lady I am coming to him presently. After the War broke out—Lord! what a hurrying and scurrying of soldiers.... Bugles blowing your head off at four o'clock in the morning—all the wagons taken to carry baggage—all the farm-horses whipped off to drag cannon ... no more sensible business done anywhere!... And when the shooting began, it was a scandal! Positively perilous to visitors! Why, I've been absolutely in danger of my life!..."
Adelaide's foot tapped impatiently on the floor of the wagonette. Her fine eyes shot forth indignant sparks. She bit her crimson lips. The drab Englishman regarded her mildly, commenting:
"If I wasn't accustomed by this time to French ways and manners, I should take it that your mamma had a temper of her own. But it's the national method of over-working the features.... Not that your Emperor is given to too much expression. Heavy, he struck me as, and puffily low-spirited! And even a worse sleeper than myself, if you ask me! For I spent the night in a room over His Majesty's, the night he stopped in the inn at Gravelotte, and didn't shut my eyes for an instant with his groanings and his moanings and his tramp ings to and fro...."
He wagged his head, and pursued with solemnity:
"In the morning I peeped out of the window and saw him drive off. All sorts of French Nobs bowing and scraping.... Orders and Stars and shiny carriages, and silver-mounted harness on prancing bays.... Yet if he had asked me, I wouldn't have changed places. Thinks I, 'How much better to be Me, plain William Furnival, an honest English Commoner, than an Emperor whose crime-stained conscience keeps him broad awake o' nights!'"
Said Juliette, her eyes blue fire, two angry roses in her usually pale cheeks:
"But you, Monsieur—who also sleep badly—is that because you have crime upon your soul?"
"What have you said to this creature that has frightened him?" Adelaide demanded, as the drab traveler's jaw dropped, and his red nose glowed brilliantly in a visage of dingy-white.
Juliette translated. Said Madame, regarding the perturbed Mr. Furnival, with a glance of superb indifference:
"He is a runaway husband of some Englishwoman who keeps a pension. Or the absconding clerk of a London notary."