He seemed to
detect that she was more interested in him than her indifferent
manner would appear to indicate. "No, I am a bad correspondent. If
Charles and I, in our present circumstances, were to write to each
other it could only lead to intrigue, for which I have no taste and
Charles no capacity."
"You seem to hint that Charles might have such a taste then," she
said, with her quiet smile, as she moved away leaving him to write.
"Charles has probably found out by this time," he answered with the
bluntness which he claimed as a prerogative of his calling and
nation, "that a soldier of Napoleon's who intrigues will make a
better career than one who merely fights."
He took up his pen and wrote with the absorption of one who has but
little time and knows exactly what to say. By chance he glanced
towards Desiree, who sat at her own table near the window. She was
stroking her cheek with the feather of her pen, looking with puzzled
eyes at the blank paper before her. Each time D'Arragon dipped his
pen he glanced at her, watching her. And Mathilde, with her
needlework, watched them both.
CHAPTER XII. FROM BORODINO.
However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.
War is the gambling of kings. Napoleon, the arch-gambler, from that
Southern sea where men, lacking cards or dice and the money to buy
either, will yet play a game of chance with the ten fingers that God
gave them for another purpose--Napoleon had dealt a hand with every
monarch in Europe before he met for the second time that Northern
adversary of cool blood who knew the waiting game.
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