Night came down on the field; the quiet stars were reflected in the placid bosom of the river, and heavy were the moans, and loud sometimes the screams of anguish from the wounded. The sisters of charity began to flit about like good angels, and the bells were rung in Weissenberg to muster the firemen for the burial of the dead. To follow the 96th in detail through all the subsequent operations would be foreign to our story; suffice it that after the attack by the Crown Prince on the 6th of August, and the outflanking of Marshal MacMahon, after the desperate battle at Worth, Charlie Pierrepont and young Frankenburg found themselves still without a wound, hurrying in pursuit of the fugitive French, who were in full retreat towards Strasburg. Their brigade halted for the night, and bivouacked among some vineyards near a little village. Now that he had been so often under fire, Charlie Pierrepont looked back with surprise to the days when, in Frankenburg, he had hoped that a French bullet might kill him! But that was before he had told his love and had been accepted; before that happy day in the Dom Kirche. Life seemed very different now; it was both precious and valuable! The staff officers occupied all the cottages in the village, so Charlie, like other regimental officers, had to sleep among his men; and thus, weary and worn, Charlie muffled himself in his ample blue cloak, and with his sword and revolver beside him, went to roost under the shelter of a haystack. Undisturbed by the falling dew, by the occasional beat of a drum or sound of a trumpet, as the field-officers of the night paraded and inspected the out-pickets, the hoarse challenges of the German sentinels, and the clatter of ambulance waggons carrying wounded to the rear, he slept soundly, yet not so soundly as not to have after some strange rambling flights about old Rugby, and a delicious dream of Ernestine, which from its vividity made a great impression on him then, and was to make a still greater, when a future episode came to pass. In the visions of the night she came to him as distinctly as she had ever appeared to him in reality, and bent over him tenderly and pityingly, as he lay there in that miserable bivouac, with a bundle of hay under his head, and he heard her murmuring softly--oh, so softly, in his ear-- 'My darling, my own darling!' Then, as a gush of her nature, which was ever passionate, deep, and earnest, came over her, she knelt by his side ere he could rise, and drew his head lovingly and caressingly on her soft breast, with her hands clasped under his chin-- 'Oh, my Carl, how weary and how worn you look!' she continued, kissing his cheek, on which her tears were falling, while the light of love, triumph, and joy shone in her beautiful eyes. 'I think of you by day and night, my love, my wife, my own wife that is to be,' murmured Carl in his sleep; 'you are indeed my guardian angel.'