A single piercing laugh rang out. She stopped the sound abruptly with one quick indrawing of her breath, and waited. Colonel Baron tried to speak, and no sound came. Denham remained motionless, not even attempting to raise his eyes. “Oui!” Lucille said restlessly. “Il est--il est----” The Colonel managed a few short words. There was no possibility of softening what had to be said. “To-night--the citadel. To-morrow--to Bitche!” “To Bitche!” echoed Lucille. “Ah-h!” To Bitche--that terrible fortress-prison, the nightmare of Verdun prisoners! Their Roy to be sent to Bitche! Mrs. Baron swayed slightly as if on the verge of fainting. Roy, her petted and idolised darling--her boy, so tenderly cared for--to be hurried away to Bitche! Lucille hardly could have told which of the two she was watching with the more intense attention--Mrs. Baron, stunned and wordless, or Denham, with his fixed still face of suffering. “And nothing--nothing--can be done?” she asked. “We have tried everything!” the Colonel answered gloomily.[1] (_To be continued._) [1] Actual fact: A young fellow at Verdun, prisoner on parole, was closely imprisoned for knocking down a bust of the Emperor in his lodgings. A RAMBLE ABOUT CHILDHOOD. BY MRS. MOLESWORTH. No true child-lover would maintain that all children are equally lovable, or indeed, in some--though, I think, rare instances--lovable at all. But in this, speaking for myself, I detect no inconsistency, no falsity to one’s colours. For the qualities or deficiencies which make a child unlovable may be summed up in one word; they are such as make it unchildlike. And this, not necessarily, if at all, as regards a child’s mental qualities. It is the moral side of child-nature that attracts--the heart, the spirit. For painful as it is to meet with precocity of mind in some instances, especially the precocity of the kind forced upon the children of the poor not unfrequently, this, unchildlike as it is, is by no means incompatible with great sweetness and beauty of the moral character, great power of affection, delightful candour, even that most exquisite of childlike possessions--trustfulness. Yes, the root of a child’s nature, the essential groundwork of it, to be lovely and lovable, must be childlike. But a literal meaning must be given to the pretty adjective. I would not even altogether eliminate from it certain qualities which might, strictly speaking, be perhaps more correctly described as _childish_, seeing that if we limited the word too narrowly, we should lose others of the great charms of children, their queer, delightful inconsistencies and exaggerations, their quaint originality, their grotesque imaginings, all of which, in more or less degree, a real child, even a dull or stupid one, possesses.