might have lost any misgiving about the vagrants or their ruler; but he
was not sure that in him was a friend.

This was an officer, not a gendarme or military policeman. Cloak and
uniform were dark blue and fine. He bore himself with the swagger of a
personage of no inconsiderable rank, and also of some degree in the
nobility. Tall, burly, overbearing, the stranger took a dislike to him
from this one glance, and would have hesitated to appeal to him for
assistance had he felt in danger.

But the beggars had flocked into the rich quarter, and their
chieftainess vanished. He allowed the military gentleman to pass, and
was not sorry to see him cross the bridge with a steady, haughty step,
which made his heel ring on each plank. But, on reaching the farther
end, to the surprise of the watcher, his carriage immediately altered;
his step became cautious and, like the other whom he had not noticed, he
skulked in a doorway. He might have been thought a visitor there, but,
at the next moment, his red whiskers reappeared between the turned-up
collar of his mantle as he showed his head under the cornice of oak.

For what motive had the officer and nobleman stooped to skulking and
prying. One alone would amply exonerate the son of Mars--devotion to
Venus. And the architectural student, not fearing to pass the soldier in
his excusable ambush for a sweetheart, since his route over the bridge
into the new city, and not wishful to spoil the lover's sport, since he
was of the age to sympathize, prepared to leave his nook.

But it was fated that continual impediments were to be thrown in his
path on this eventful night. He had hardly taken two steps out of his
covert, which kept him hidden from the officer but revealed him to any