“What shall we have for supper?” cry I, vivaciously.  “I never can see anybody eating without longing to eat too. Blutwurst! That means black-pudding, I suppose—­certainly not that—­how they do call a spade a spade in German!  By-the-by, what are the soldiers having?  Can you see?  I think I saw a vision of prawns! I saw things sticking out like their legs.  I must find out!”

I rise, on pretense of getting a little wooden stool from under an unoccupied table close to the object of my curiosity, and, as I stoop to pick it up, I fraudulently glance over the nearest warrior’s shoulder.  My sin finds me out.  He turns and catches me in the act, and at the same time a young man—­not a warrior, at least not in uniform, but in loose gray British clothes—­turns, too, and fixes me with a stony, British stare.  I am returning in some confusion, having moreover incidentally discovered that they were not prawns, when to my extreme surprise, I hear my husband addressing the young gentleman in gray.

“Why, Frank, my dear boy, is that you?  Who would have thought of seeing you here?”

“As to that,” replies the young man, stretching out a ready right hand, “who would have thought of seeing you? What on earth has brought you here?”

Sir Roger laughs, but with a sort of shyness.

“Like the man in the parable, I have married a wife,” he says; then, putting his hand kindly on the young fellow’s shoulder—­“Nancy, you have been wishing that we might meet some one we knew, have not you?  Well, here is some one.  I suppose that I must introduce you formally to each other.  Lady Tempest—­Mr. Musgrave.”

Despite the searching, and, I should have thought, exhaustive examination of my appearance, that my new friend has already indulged in, he thinks good to look at me again, as he bows, and this time with a sort of undisguisable surprise in his great dark eyes.

“I must apologize,” he says, taking off his hat.  “I had heard that you were going to be married, but I am so behind the time, have been so out of the way of hearing news, that I did not know that it had come off yet.”

He says this with a little of that doubtful stiffness, which sometimes owes its birth to shyness, and sometimes to self-consciousness; but he seems in no hurry to return to his friends, the big, blond soldiers.  On the contrary, he draws a chair up to our table.

“Do they ever get prawns here?” say I, with apparent irrelevancy, not being able to disengage my mind from the thought of shell-fish, “or is it too far inland?  I am so fond of them, and I fancied that these gentlemen—­” (slightly indicating the broad, blue warrior-backs)—­“were eating some.”

His mouth curves into a sudden smile.

“Was that why you came to look?”

I laugh.

“I did not mean to be seen:  that person must have had eyes in the back of his head.”