Once more brother and sister stood face to face in the great shadowy audience-room of the Reist palace. Again, too, there was the clamour of many voices in the streets below, for a messenger had just galloped in with news from the front, and a sad procession of ambulance wagons had arrived for the hospital. Only it seemed to them both that that other day, of which both for a moment thought, lay far back in some uncertain past. Events had marched so rapidly during the last few months that all sense of proportion and distance was lost. They looked at one another with white, haggard faces. Marie saw that her brother no longer wore his sword.
“What has happened?” she asked, faintly.
The fires of hell were smouldering in his dark eyes. Yet he answered with some attempt at calmness.
“I challe
