The camp was ever full of conflicting rumours concerning combined assaults, expected sorties, the probabilities of peace, or a continuance of the war; alleged treasons among certain French officers, who were at one time alleged to have given the Russians plans of their own batteries; that Menschikoff was dead from a wound, and also Yermiloff the admiral; that _General_ Tolstoff was now in command of the left towards Inkermann. (If so, was Valerie now in Sebastopol? How I longed for the united attack--the storm and capture that might enable me to see her once again!) And amid all these varied rumours there came one--carried swiftly by horsemen through Bucharest and Varna--which reached us on the 7th of April, to the effect that Nicholas the mighty Czar of All the Russias, had gone to his last account; and I do not think it was a demise we mourned much. We sent intelligence of it by a flag of truce to the Russians; but they received it with scorn, as a "weak invention of the enemy." And now the snow began to wear away; the clouds that floated over the blue Euxine and the green spires of Sebastopol became light and fleecy; the young grass began to sprout, and the wild hyacinths, the purple crocuses, and tender snowdrops, the violet and the primrose, were blooming in the Valley of Death, and on the fresh mould that marked where the graves of our comrades lay. CHAPTER LIII.--NEWS FROM CRAIGADERYN. It was impossible for me not to feel lingering in my heart a deep and tender interest for Valerie. She had not deceived or ill-used me; we had simply been separated by the force of circumstances; by her previous troth to Tolstoff, whom I flattered myself she could not love, even if she respected or esteemed him. That they were married by this time I could scarcely doubt, as she had assured me that she was on "the very eve" of her nuptials (one of those "marriages of convenience," according to Caradoc's book); and if he held a command so high in Sebastopol, there was every reason to conclude she must be with him. In the event of a general assault, I was fully resolved to send my card to headquarters as a volunteer for the storming column, though I knew right well that I dare not allow myself to fall alive, into _his_ hands, at all events; thus the whole situation gave me an additional and more personal interest in the fall and capture of that place than, perhaps, inspired any other man in the whole allied army. What if Tolstoff should be killed? This surmise opened up a wide field for speculation.