"Of course I don't blame you, but it's hard on me that you should have grown so--so maddeningly pretty." Maximof repeated his loud laugh and departed. Vera sighed. "I ought to have known you before, my friend," she thought; "before--before Paul! But after all, the gulf between Paul and me is wide enough!" CHAPTER XIV. The war was in full swing, victory favouring the French troops, for the most part, though occasionally she would hearten the defending Russians with a smile or two of encouragement. Louise, with her fellow recruits, had joined Ney's army corps. Already she had been present in several minor engagements and had even received a slight flesh wound in the left hand. The army surgeon attending her had remarked upon the smallness of her hand. "It might be a woman's!" he said with a laugh. "There's nothing here to keep you out of the fun," he added; "get back to the colours as soon as you please." The Russian General, Barclay de Tolly, was throughout unwilling to expose his troops to the risk of battle. He was no coward. In the face of much patriotic opposition from his fellow generals and the nation at large, he adhered to his own tactics, which were to lure the enemy constantly forward, striking only when a blow could be dealt with effect. The peasantry, patriots to a man, beseeched their general to bid them set fire to their standing crops, to their very homes and granaries, that the enemy might find but a desolate waste in his advance. Thousands of villages were so destroyed, their inhabitants preferring to wander homeless and hungry into the woods rather than allow the enemy to profit, even for a night, by the use of their property. Michel Prevost, as Louise was called among her fellows, was soon a favourite in her regiment. No one had the slightest suspicion that she was anything but what she pretended to be, a young conscript like thousands of others who went to swell the Grande Armée. Occasionally remarks would be made--jokes as to her complexion, which was fair for a man's; her slight though well-knit figure, her modesty, her obvious dislike for coarse topics of conversation, but though occasionally a man might declare with a laugh that Michel was as much woman as man, barring his fencing, which was second to none, no one dreamed that in saying such a thing he was nearer the truth than he knew. Never a day passed but Louise looked anxiously for the Baron d'Estreville. He belonged, she knew, to a fashionable light cavalry regiment, and this regiment she saw more than once, in the distance; but during the first month of her campaigning she never succeeded in catching a glimpse of her friend, an unkind arrangement of destiny which caused Louise to sigh daily. Then came a day of stress and battle.