health of the bride. He thumped himself on the brow with his closed
fist.

"Sacred-name-of-a-thunderstorm," he said. "Where have I seen that
face before?"

Sebastian went out by the Frauenthor to the quay. Although it was
dusk, the granaries were still at work. The river was full of craft
and the roadway choked by rows and rows of carts, all of one
pattern, too big and too heavy for roads that are laid across a
marsh.

He turned to the right, but found his way blocked at the corner of
the Langenmarkt, where the road narrows to pass under the Grunes
Thor. Here the idlers of the evening hour were collected in a
crowd, peering over each other's shoulders towards the roadway and
the bridge. Sebastian was a tall man, and had no need to stand on
tip-toe in order to see the straight rows of bayonets swinging past,
and the line of shakos rising and falling in unison with the beat of
a thousand feet on the hollow woodwork of the drawbridge.

The troops had been passing out of the city all the afternoon on the
road to Elbing and Konigsberg.

"It is the same," said a man standing near to Sebastian, "at the
Hohes Thor, where they are marching out by the road leading to
Konigsberg by way of Dessau."

"It is farther than Konigsberg that they are going," was the
significant answer of a white-haired veteran who had probably been