looked like a dark parcel thrown down on the bench where he
sat. He was still burying his face in his handkerchief. A carriage
had stopped in front, and yet another woman hurried up, in whom Lucy
recognized Maria Blond. She was not alone; a stout man got down after
her.

"It's that thief of a Steiner," said Caroline. "How is it they haven't
sent him back to Cologne yet? I want to see how he looks when he comes
in."

They turned round, but when after the lapse of ten minutes Maria Blond
appeared, she was alone. She had twice mistaken the staircase. And when
Lucy, in some astonishment, questioned her:

"What, he?" she said. "My dear, don't you go fancying that he'll come
upstairs! It's a great wonder he's escorted me as far as the door. There
are nearly a dozen of them smoking cigars."

As a matter of fact, all the gentlemen were meeting downstairs. They had
come strolling thither in order to have a look at the boulevards, and
they hailed one another and commented loudly on that poor girl's death.
Then they began discussing politics and strategy. Bordenave, Daguenet,
Labordette, Prulliere and others, besides, had swollen the group, and
now they were all listening to Fontan, who was explaining his plan for
taking Berlin within a week.

Meanwhile Maria Blond was touched as she stood by the bedside and
murmured, as the others had done before her:

"Poor pet! The last time I saw her was in the grotto at the Gaite."

"Ah, she's changed; she's changed!" Rose Mignon repeated with a smile of
gloomiest dejection.

Two more women arrived. These were Tatan Nene and Louise Violaine.
They had been wandering about the Grand Hotel for twenty minutes past,
bandied from waiter to waiter, and had ascended and descended more than
thirty flights of stairs amid a perfect stampede of travelers who
were hurrying to leave Paris amid the panic caused by the war and the
excitement on the boulevards. Accordingly they just dropped down on
chairs when they came in, for they were too tired to think about the
dead. At that moment a loud noise came from the room next door, where
people were pushing trunks about and striking against furniture to an
accompaniment of strident, outlandish syllables. It was a young Austrian
couple, and Gaga told how during her agony the neighbors had played a
game of catch as catch can and how, as only an unused door divided the
two rooms, they had heard them laughing and kissing when one or the
other was caught.