m
the faces of the men, with the wonderful feeling that as there was
to-day, now there would also be to-morrow.

She felt a curious shrinking from the people she knew. For this one day
she wanted to be alone. This peace was a thing of the soul, and of the
soul alone. She knew what it would be with the people she knew best in
Paris,--hastily arranged riotous parties, a great deal of champagne
and noise, and, overlying the real sentiment, much sentimentality. She
realized, with a faint smile, that the old Audrey would have welcomed
that very gayety. She was even rather resentful with herself for her own
aloofness.

She quite forgot luncheon, and early afternoon found her on the balcony
of the Crillon Hotel, overlooking the Place de la Concorde. Paris was
truly awake by that time, and going mad. The long-quiet fountains were
playing, Poilus and American soldiers had seized captured German cannon
and were hauling them wildly about. If in the morning the crowd had been
largely khaki, now the French blue predominated. Flags and confetti were
everywhere, and every motor, as it, pushed slowly through the crowd,
carried on roof and running board and engine hood crowds of self-invited
passengers. A British band was playing near the fountain. A line of
helmets above the mass and wild cheers revealed French cavalry riding
through, and, heralded by jeers and much applause came a procession of
the proletariat, of odds and ends, soldiers and shop-girls, mechanics
and street-sweepers and cabmen and students, carrying an effigy of the
Kaiser on a gibbet.

As the sun went down, the outlines of the rejoicing city took on the
faint mist-blue of a dream city. It softened the outlines of the Eiffel
tower to strange and fairy-like beauty and gave to the trees in the
Tuileries gardens the lack of definition of an old engraving. And as
if to remind the rejoicing of the price of their happiness, there came
limping through the crowd a procession of the mutilees. They stumped
along on wooden legs or on crutches; they rode in wheeled chairs; they
were led, who could not see. And they smiled and cheered. None of them
was whole, but every one was a full man, for all that.

Audrey cried, shamelessly like Suzanne, but quietly. And, not for the
first time that day, she thought of Chris. She had never loved him, but
it was pitiful that he could not have lived. He had so loved life. He
would have so relished all this, the pageantry of it, and the gaye