'Ah!--yes; M. Adolphe loves me, I believe, and--and perhaps I may learn to love him in time. I am not sure. I may marry some one else, and learn to love that some one. Mon père will arrange all that for me, and it will be so kind of him.' Charlie looked puzzled; but ere long, in the case of Célandine herself, he was to see how matrimonial matters are arranged in the land of the silver lilies. Her question, 'When are you to be married?' opened up no new train of thought to Charlie; that important _when_ had been a source of frequent and painful surmise; but a new idea was ever before him now. What had Ernestine heard of his fate?--that he was killed, wounded, or missing? He had no means of communicating with her now, and thus sparing her that which he would gladly have done--a single sigh, a single throb of pain. There was no one at the chateau could tell him where the 95th were, whether in front of Metz, besieging Strasbourg, or fighting at Phalsburg. But, oh, how to relieve the grief of his betrothed! He would not, for worlds, have cost that warm, wilful, and impassioned heart one pang! Yet there he lay on his back, with a closing wound, helpless. Like an iron weight it bore on his heart, the remoteness and dubiety of their meeting again; and when all thought of his personal danger passed away, this reflection weighed more heavily on him than ever, while his very career as a soldier made the future more uncertain and gloomy. He had but one fixed, yet vague, idea--that, at the risk of his life, he would see Ernestine before he returned to the regiment in which he was, as yet, unfit to serve, and assure her of his all-unaltered love. Times there were when he thought he would ask Célandine to write to her, but in turn was afraid to do so--to Herminia, or to Ernestine, over whose postal correspondence, doubtless, the Countess kept a strict vigil--or, if she did write, there was no other post than the field one between France and Prussia now, and that was with the German army. So Charlie could but lie on his bed and writhe, though in the kindly hands of the sweetest of little nurses. Would the Countess Adelaide, he sometimes asked himself, feel any compunction for her proud severity, any pity for her daughter's honest lover, on hearing of his probable fate? Alas! it seemed more likely that she would exult at it as a barrier, a bramble, removed from her path. The Count was an old soldier; perhaps he might relent and prove generous; and so, on and on, Charlie hoped, surmised, and pondered, till his very brain ached. Célandine knew that Charlie was English by birth, yet Prussian by sympathy, which she deplored--they were such barbarians, those men in the spiked helmets. Thus when she played or sang to him, which she did with great taste and sweetness, with good taste she only chose neutral airs and songs, such as those from the Trovatore, etc., and in these Adolphe Guerrand frequently joined her.