“This door is by the side of the kitchens.  A little to the left is an extensive conservatory, nearly all the glass of which has been shattered by a shell, but that fact makes it all the more useful as a path for us.  If we reach it unobserved we can creep through the mass of flowers and shrubbery to a large fishpond which lies just beyond it.  You’re a good swimmer, as I know—­and you can swim along its edge until you reach the shrubbery on the other side.  Then you ought to find an opening by which you can reach the French army.”

“And you, Weber?”

“I?  Oh, I must stay here.  The Prince of Auersperg is a man of great importance.  He is high in the confidence of the Kaiser.  Besides his royal rank he commands one of the German armies.  If I am to secure precious information for France it must be done in this house.”

“Come away with me, Weber.  You’ve risked enough already.  They’ll catch you and you know the fate of spies.  I feel like a criminal or coward abandoning you to so much danger, after all that you’ve done for me.”

“Thank you for your good words, Mr. Scott, but it’s impossible for me to go.  Keep in the shadow of the wall, and a dozen steps will take you to the conservatory.”

John wrung the Alsatian’s hand, stepped out, and pressed himself against the side of the house.  The breeze still blew upon his face, revivifying and intoxicating.  The lazy, feathery clouds were yet drifting before the moon and stars.

He saw to his right the gleam of a bayonet as a sentinel walked back and forth and he saw another to his left.  His heart beat high with hope.  He was merely a mote in infinite night, and surely they could not see him.

He walked swiftly along in the shadow of the house, and then sprang into the conservatory, where he crouched between two tall rose bushes.  He waited there a little while, breathing hard, but he had not been observed.  From his rosy shelter he could still see the sentinels on either side, walking up and down, undisturbed.  Around him was a frightful litter.  The shell, the history of which he would never know, had struck fairly in the center of the place, and it must have burst in a thousand fragments.  Scarcely a pane of glass had been left unbroken, and the great pots, containing rare fruits and flowers, were mingled mostly in shattered heaps.  It was a pitiable wreck, and it stirred John, although he had seen so many things so much worse.

He walked a little distance in a stooping position, and then stood up among some shrubs, tall enough to hide him.  He noticed a slight dampness in the air, and he saw, too, that the feathery clouds were growing darker.  The faint quiver in the air brought with it, as always, the rumble of the guns, but he believed that it was not a blended sound.  There was real thunder on the horizon, where the French lay, and then he saw a distant flash, not white like that of a searchlight, but like yellow lightning.  Rain, a storm perhaps, must be at hand.  He had read that nearly all the great battles in the civil war in his own country had been followed at once by violent storms of thunder, lightning and rain.  Then why not here, where immense artillery combats never ceased?