“A man?” I cried. “Describe him. What was he like?”
“I only caught one glimpse of him, m’sieur. He was fair, and had a long red scar across his cheek.”
“A scar?” I shrieked in dismay, as the terrible truth dawned suddenly upon me. Rose, whom I had first met in Cologne, when a student on the Rhine-bank, had told me that I was not her first love; and now I remembered that she had long ago been acquainted with my fellow-student, Paul Olbrich.
It was my own wife whom I had assisted to elope with my enemy!
Ah! time has not effaced her memory. My sorrow is still as bitter to-day as it was in that cold December dawn, with the horrors of war around me. My life has become soured, and my hair grey. Since that eventful night, I have wandered in strange lands, endeavouring to stifle my grief; for, still under sentence of death as a spy, I have been an exile and an outlaw until to-day.
What, you ask, has become of her?
Far away, in a secluded valley in the Harz, under the shadow of the mystic Brocken, there is a plain white cross in the village burying-ground, bearing the words, “Rose Henault, 1872.”
My enemy, Paul Olbrich, a year after the war had ended, succeeded to the family title and estates; and to-day he is one of the most prominent men in Europe, and acts as the diplomatic representative of Germany at a certain Court that must be nameless.
Truly, Fate has been unkind to me. To-day, for the first time, I have taken my skeleton from its cupboard. Would that I could bury it forever!