Love!  
Can one credit the romanticists that—across the seas and hills and years—there is so strange a thing as a single-hearted love, an all- conquering, all-subduing, all-renovating love?
 
In the train at Budslav—where the staff-officers were billeted—it was known that Agrenev had such a single, overmastering, life-long love.
 
A wife—the woman, the who loves only once—to whom love is the most beautiful and only thing in life, will do heroic deeds to get past all the Army , the enemy's reconnaissance, and reach her beloved. To her there is but one huge heart in the world and nothing more.
 
Lieutenant Agrenev's quarters were in a distant carriage, Number 30- 35.
 
The Staff Officers' train stood under cover. No one was allowed to strike a light there. In the evening, after curtaining the windows with blankets, the officers gathered together in the carriage of the General Commanding the XXth , to play cards and drink cognac. Someone remarked that there was a close resemblance between life at the front and life in a , in as much as in both the chief topic of conversation was women: there was no reason, therefore, why should not be sent to the front for fasting and prayer.
 
While they were playing cards, the guard, Pan Ponyatsky, came in and to the cavalry-captain Kremnev. He told him of a woman, young and very beautiful. The captain's knees began to tremble; he sat helplessly on the step of the carriage, and in his pocket for a cigarette. Pan Ponyatsky warned him that he must not strike a light. In the distance could be heard the roar of , like an approaching midnight storm. Kremnev had never felt such a joy as he felt now, sitting on the carriage step. Pan Ponyatsky repeated that she was a beauty, and waiting—that the captain must not delay; and led him through the dark corridor of the train.
 
The carriage of men and leather; behind the doors o............