provinces nor the indemnity of five
milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that sight of Paris, in
a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and going up in smoke and
flame on that beautiful spring night.

"Ah, it was sure to come," he added in a lower voice. "Fine work, my
masters!"

It seemed to Henriette as if her heart would break in presence of that
dire catastrophe. Her personal grief was lost to sight for some minutes,
swallowed up in the great drama of a people's atonement that was
being enacted before her eyes. The thought of the lives that would
be sacrificed to the devouring flames, the sight of the great capital
blazing on the horizon, emitting the infernal light of the cities that
were accursed and smitten for their iniquity, elicited from her an
involuntary cry of anguish. She clasped her hands, asking:

"Oh, merciful Father, of what have we been guilty that we should be
punished thus?"

Otto raised his arm in an oratorical attitude. He was on the point of
speaking, with the stern, cold-blooded vehemence of the military
bigot who has ever a quotation from Holy Writ at his tongue's end, but
glancing at the young woman, the look he encountered from her candid,
gentle eyes checked him. Besides, his gesture had spoken for him; it
told his hatred for the nation, his conviction that he was in France to
mete out justice, delegated by the God of Armies, to chastise a perverse
and stiff-necked generation. Paris was burning off there on the horizon
in expiation of its centuries of dissolute life, of its heaped-up
measure of crime and lust. Once again the German race were to be the
saviors of the world, were to purge Europe of the remnant of Latin
corruption. He let his arm fall to his side and simply said:

"It is the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a
fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that
line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava--"

Neither spoke for a long time; an awed silence rested on them. The great
waves of flame continued to ascend, sending up streamers and ribbons
of vivid light high into the heavens. Beneath the sea of fire was every
moment extending its boundaries, a tossing, stormy, burning ocean,
whence now arose dense clouds of smoke that collected over the city in
a huge pall of a somber coppery hue, which was wafted slowly athwart the
blackness of the night, streaking the vault of heaven with its accursed
rain of as