“Brand,” he said, in his shrewd way, “is combining martyrdom with romance--an unsafe combination. The pretty Elsa has lighted up his romantic heart because of her adoration and her feminine sentiment. I don’t blame him. At his age--after four years of war and exile--her gold-spun hair would have woven a web round my heart. Youth is youth, and don’t you forget it, my lad!” “Where does the martyrdom come in?” I asked. The little doctor blinked through his horn spectacles. “Don’t you see it? Brand has been working out new ideals of life. After killing a good many German boys, as sniper and chief assassin of the XI. Corps, he wants to marry a German girl as a proclamation to the world that he--Wickham Brand--has done with hatred and is out for the brotherhood of man and the breaking down of the old frontiers. For that ideal he is going to sacrifice his reputation and make a martyr of himself--not forgetting that romance is pleasant and Elsa von Kreuzenach as pretty as a peach! Bless his heart, I admire his courage and his boyishness.” Any doubt I had about the reality of Brand’s passion for Elsa was at least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic thing that had happened to both of them. He came into my room at the “Domhof” as though he had just seen a ghost. And, indeed, it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand between him and Elsa. “My dear old man!” I cried at the sight of him. “What on earth has happened?” “A damnable and inconceivable thing!” I poured him out some brandy, and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket, he pulled out a silver cigarette-case, and going over to the fireplace, dropped it into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the dampness of the room. “Why do you do that?” I asked. He watched the metal box blacken and then begin to melt. Several times he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers. “My poor little Elsa!” he said in a pitiful way. “_Mein hussches Madel!_” The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were not in the war, who do not know how many strange, fantastic things happened in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in the minds of Brand and Elsa. It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold’s drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other, though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case. “May I open it?” she asked. But she did not open it. She stared at a little monogram on its cover, and then began to tremble so that Brand was scared. “What is the matter?” he said. Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet. “That box!” she said, in an agonised voice. “Where did you find it?”