l the soldiers of his brigade. Nowadays, how can
you expect an officer to know his men?"

She had ceased to listen. She was looking at a woman selling fried
potatoes. She realized that she was hungry and wished to eat fried
potatoes.

He remonstrated:

"Nobody knows how they are cooked."

But he had to buy two sous' worth of fried potatoes, and to see that the
woman put salt on them.

While Therese was eating them, he led her into deserted streets far from
the gaslights. Soon they found themselves in front of the cathedral. The
moon silvered the roofs.

"Notre Dame," she said. "See, it is as heavy as an elephant yet as
delicate as an insect. The moon climbs over it and looks at it with a
monkey's maliciousness. She does not look like the country moon at
Joinville. At Joinville I have a path--a flat path--with the moon at the
end of it. She is not there every night; but she returns faithfully,
full, red, familiar. She is a country neighbor. I go seriously to meet
her. But this moon of Paris I should not like to know. She is not
respectable company. Oh, the things that she has seen during the time she
has been roaming around the roofs!"

He smiled a tender smile.

"Oh, your little path where you walked alone and that you liked because
the sky was at the end of it! I see it as if I were there."

It was at the Joinville castle that he had seen her for the first time,
and had at once loved her. It was there, one night, that he had told her
of his love, to which she had listened, dumb, with a pained expression on
her mouth and a vague look in her eyes.

The reminiscence of this little path where she walked alone moved him,
troubled him, made him live again the enchanted hours of his first
desires and hopes. He tried to find her hand in her muff and pressed her
slim wrist under the fur.

A little girl carrying violets saw that they were lovers, and offered
flowers to them. He bought a two-sous' bouquet and offered it to Therese.

She was walking toward the cathedral. She was thinking: "It is like an
enormous beast--a beast of the Apocalypse."

At the other end of the bridge a flower-woman, wrinkled, bearded, gray
with years and dust, followed them with her basket full of mimosas and
roses. Therese, who held her violets and was trying to slip them into her
waist, said, joyfully:

"Thank you, I have some."

"One can see that you are young," the old woman shouted with a wicked
air, as she went away.

Therese