The persons are, Captain Arnault, of the French army; Surgeon
Surville, of the French ambulance; Surgeon Wetzel, of the German
army; Mercy Merrick, attached as nurse to the French ambulance;
and Grace Roseberry, a traveling lady on her way to England.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWO WOMEN.


IT was a dark night. The rain was pouring in torrents.

Late in the evening a skirmishing party of the French and a
skirmishing party of the Germans had met, by accident, near the
little village of Lagrange, close to the German frontier. In the
struggle that followed, the French had (for once) got the better
of the enemy. For the time, at least, a few hundreds out of the
host of the invaders had been forced back over the frontier. It
was a trifling affair, occurring not long after the great German
victory of Weissenbourg, and the newspapers took little or no
notice of it.

Captain Arnault, commanding on the French side, sat alone in one
of the cottages of the village, inhabited by the miller of the
district. The Captain was reading, by the light of a solitary
tallow-candle, some intercepted dispatches taken from the
Germans. He had suffered the wood fire, scattered over the large
open grate, to burn low; the red embers only faintly illuminated
a part of the room. On the floor behind him lay some of the