ng of its gas.

"What a multitude of stars!" murmured Abbe Jouve. "There are thousands
of them gleaming."

He had just taken a chair and sat down at her side. On hearing him,
she gazed upwards into the summer night. The heaven was studded with
golden lights. On the very verge of the horizon a constellation was
sparkling like a carbuncle, while a dust of almost invisible stars
sprinkled the vault above as though with glittering sand.
Charles's-Wain was slowly turning its shaft in the night.

"Look!" said Helene in her turn, "look at that tiny bluish star! See
--far away up there. I recognize it night after night. But it dies and
fades as the night rolls on."

The Abbe's presence no longer annoyed her. With him by her side, she
imagined the quiet was deepening around. A few words passed between
them after long intervals of silence. Twice she questioned him on the
names of the stars--the sight of the heavens had always interested her
--but he was doubtful and pleaded ignorance.

"Do you see," she asked, "that lovely star yonder whose lustre is so
exquisitely clear?"

"On the left, eh?" he replied, "near another smaller, greenish one?
Ah! there are so many of them that my memory fails me."

They again lapsed into silence, their eyes still turned upwards,
dazzled, quivering slightly at the sight of that stupendous swarming
of luminaries. In the vast depths of the heavens, behind thousands of
stars, thousands of others twinkled in ever-increasing multitudes,
with the clear brilliancy of gems. The Milky Way was already
whitening, displaying its solar specks, so innumerable and so distant
that in the vault of the firmament they form but a trailing scarf of
light.

"It fills me with fear," said Helene in a whisper; and that she might
see it all no more she bent her head and glanced down on the gaping
abyss in which Paris seemed to be engulfed. In its depths not a light
could yet be seen; night had rolled over it and plunged it into
impenetrable darkness. Its mighty, continuous rumble seemed to have
sunk into a softer key.

"Are you weeping?" asked the Abbe, who had heard a sound of sobbing.

"Yes," simply answered Helene.

They could not see each other. For a long time she continued weeping,
her whole being exhaling a plaintive murmur. Behind them, meantime,
Jeanne lay at rest in innocent sleep, and Monsieur Rambaud, his whole
attention engrossed, bent his grizzled head over the doll which he had
dismembered. At t