of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete.* So he went
on while the quay, after flashing forth for a moment, relapsed into
darkness, and a terrible thunder-clap shook the drowsy quarter.

* The street of the Headless woman.--ED.

When Claude, blinded by the rain, got to his door--a low, rounded door,
studded with iron--he fumbled for the bell knob, and he was exceedingly
surprised--indeed, he started--on finding a living, breathing body
huddled against the woodwork. Then, by the light of a second flash, he
perceived a tall young girl, dressed in black, and drenched already, who
was shivering with fear. When a second thunder-clap had shaken both of
them, Claude exclaimed:

'How you frighten one! Who are you, and what do you want?'

He could no longer see her; he only heard her sob, and stammer:

'Oh, monsieur, don't hurt me. It's the fault of the driver, whom I hired
at the station, and who left me at this door, after ill-treating me.
Yes, a train ran off the rails, near Nevers. We were four hours late,
and a person who was to wait for me had gone. Oh, dear me; I have never
been in Paris before, and I don't know where I am....'

Another blinding flash cut her short, and with dilated eyes she stared,
terror-stricken, at that part of the strange capital, that violet-tinted
apparition of a fantastic city. The rain had ceased falling. On the
opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey
houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their
irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became
clear on the left as far as the blue slate eaves of the Hotel de Ville,
and on the right as far as the leaden-hued dome of St. Paul. What
startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the
deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy
piles of the Pont Marie, to the light arches of the new Pont Louis
Philippe. Strange masses peopled the river, a sleeping flotilla of small
boats and yawls, a floating washhouse, and a dredger moored to the quay.
Then, farther down, against the other bank, were lighters, laden with
coals, and barges full of mill stone, dominated as it were by the
gigantic arm of a steam crane. But, suddenly, everything disappeared
again.

Claude had an instinctive distrust of women--that story of an accident,
of a belated train and a brutal cabman, seemed to him a ridiculous
invention. At the second thunder-clap the girl ha