affected calmness:

"Good-evening, Silvine."

"Good-evening, Honore."

Then, to keep from breaking down and bursting into tears, she turned
away, and recognizing Maurice, gave him a smile. Jean's presence was
embarrassing to her. She felt as if she were choking somehow, and
removed the _foulard_ that she wore about her neck.

Honore continued, dropping the friendly _thou_ of other days:

"We were anxious about you, Silvine, on account of the Prussians being
so near at hand."

All at once her face became very pale and showed great distress; raising
her hand to her eyes as if to shut out some atrocious vision, and
directing an involuntary glance toward the room where Charlot was
slumbering, she murmured:

"The Prussians--Oh! yes, yes, I saw them."

Sinking wearily upon a chair she told how, when the 7th corps came into
Raucourt, she had fled for shelter to the house of her godfather, Doctor
Dalichamp, hoping that Father Fouchard would think to come and take her
up before he left the town. The main street was filled with a surging
throng, so dense that not even a dog could have squeezed his way through
it, and up to four o'clock she had felt no particular alarm, tranquilly
employed in scraping lint in company with some of the ladies of the
place; for the doctor, with the thought that they might be called on
to care for some of the wounded, should there be a battle over in the
direction of Metz and Verdun, had been busying himself for the last two
weeks with improvising a hospital in the great hall of the _mairie_.
Some people who dropped in remarked that they might find use for their
hospital sooner than they expected, and sure enough, a little after
midday, the roar of artillery had reached their ears from over Beaumont
way. But that was not near enough to cause anxiety and no one was
alarmed, when, all at once, just as the last of the French troops were
filing out of Raucourt, a shell, with a frightful crash, came tearing
through the roof of a neighboring house. Two others followed in quick
succession; it was a German battery shelling the rear-guard of the 7th
corps. Some of the wounded from Beaumont had already been brought in
to the _mairie_, where it was feared that the enemy's projectiles would
finish them as they lay on their mattresses waiting for the doctor to
come and operate on them. The men were crazed with fear, and would have
risen and gone down into the cellars, notwithstanding their mangled
limb