it; I'm holding," said Luce, grasping his hand.

Thus back and forward, tenderly, gravely, they talked like a pair of
good old friends. But they took good care that the table should stay
between them.

And behold, they perceived that the night had filled the room. Pierre
rose hurriedly. Luce did nothing to retain him. The short hour had
passed. They were afraid of the hour that might come. They said _au
revoir_ to each other with the same constraint, the same low and choked
voice as when he came in. On the threshold their hands scarcely dared to
press each other.

But when the door was shut, just as he was about to leave the garden, as
he turned his head toward the window of the ground floor, he saw in the
last gleam of the copper-colored twilight, on the pane, the outline of
Luce, who was following his departure into the uncertain depths of the
gleam-filled obscurity with a face full of passion. And turning back to
the window, he pressed his lips against the closed pane. Their lips
kissed through the wall of glass. Then Luce moved back into the shadows
of the room and the curtain fell.

* * * * *

FOR the past fortnight they had been unaware of anything that was going
on in the world. In Paris people might make arrests and issue
condemnations as hard as they could. Germany might make treaties and
tear up those she had signed. Governments might lie, the press denounce
and armies kill. They did not read the papers. They knew there was the
war somewhere all about them, just as there is typhus or else influenza;
but that did not touch them; they did not want to think about it.

The war recalled itself to them that night. They had already gone to bed
(they spent their hearts so freely in those days that when evening came
they were worn out). They heard the alarm signals, each in his or her
respective quarter, and declined to get up. They hid their heads in
their beds under the bedclothes as a child will during a
thunder-storm--not at all from fear (they were positive that nothing
could happen to them) but in order to dream. Listening to the air
rumbling in the night, Luce thought:

"It would be delightful to listen to the storm as it passes, in his
arms."

Pierre stopped his ears. Let nothing trouble his thoughts! He insisted
on picking out on the piano of memory the song of the day passed, the
melodious thread of the hours, from the first minute that he entered
Luce's house, the slightest inflections of her