'For you to nurse,' replied Guebhard, with a smile on his lips and a glitter in his eye, that, had Cecil seen it, might have warned him of mischief to come; and low though they spoke, he heard his despatches referred to more than once: thus he was scarcely surprised when he changed places with Guebhard and rejoined Margarita at the piano, that, under cover of a very brilliant sonata, she questioned him about them. 'Where are those despatches about which Mattei Guebhard seems so anxious?' she asked. 'In my sabretache.' 'And it?' 'Is in my apartment,' he replied, with surprise. 'As you cannot wear it constantly, take them therefrom,' she said, in an emphatic whisper. 'Why?' 'They may be abstracted.' 'By whom?' 'I do not--cannot say by whom,' she replied, with half-averted face. 'Do you suspect?' 'Yes.' And a crash on the instrument closed a conversation, on which Cecil resolved not to lose a moment in acting, and repairing to his own room, transferred the packet from the sabretache attached to his sword-belt to the breast-pocket of his uniform tunic. He felt grateful to her for the interest Margarita had thus evinced in him, but he was sorely puzzled to know why Guebhard was so anxious to obtain the documents committed to his care; and he was soon convinced that her suggestion had not come too soon, when about two hours after he discovered the Servian captain in the act of quitting his--Cecil's--apartment. 'You here, Captain Guebhard?' he exclaimed, with surprise and indignation in his tone, all the more so that he read a baffled and confused expression in the face of the other. 'Pardon me,' said he, bowing and passing on, 'but the dressing-bell has rung for dinner--I was in haste, and mistook your apartment for mine.' It might be so; but Cecil thought it a curious circumstance that his belt and sabretache, which he had left hanging on the wall, were now lying on a sofa, and he smiled as he felt the packet safe in his breast, and resolved to secure his door for that night, the last he meant to spend in Palenka. Cecil resolved to be in every way on his guard against this man Guebhard, and yet ere the night passed he was very nearly having a quarrel with him--a quarrel which, but for some forbearance on the part of the former, might have ended in a resort to pistols between them, after the ladies had retired and he and the captain were left to their cigars and wine; but the latter preferred raki, and under its influence he lost much of his subtle suavity and oily politeness, and the real Bulgar in his blood came out. And, sooth to say, Cecil was not sorry when the ladies did retire, for Margarita, either to please and amuse herself, or to tease and anger Guebhard, had addressed the whole, or nearly the whole, of her conversation to him, though it ran chiefly on the progress of the war.