han forty-eight hours, people came to regret the worst days
of the siege. Without leaders, without direction, the honest men
had lost their heads. All the braves who had returned at the time
of the armistice had again taken flight. Soon people had to hide
or to fly to avoid being incorporated in the battalions of the
Commune. Night and day, around the walls, the fusillade rattled,
and the artillery thundered.

Again M. Favoral had given up going to his office. What's the use?
Sometimes, with a singular look, he would say to his wife and
children,

"This time it is indeed a liquidation. Paris is lost!"

And indeed they thought so, when at the hour of the supreme struggle,
among the detonations of the cannon and the explosion of the shells;
they felt their house shaking to its very foundations; when in the
midst of the night they saw their apartment as brilliantly lighted
as at mid-day by the flames which were consuming the Hotel de Ville
and the houses around the Place de la Bastille. And, in fact, the
rapid action of the troops alone saved Paris from destruction.

But towards the end of the following week, matters had commenced to
quiet down; and Gilberte learned the return of Marius.

XX

"At last it has been given to my eyes to contemplate him, and to my
arms to press him against my heart!"

It was in these terms that the old Italian master, all vibrating
with enthusiasm, and with his most terrible accent, announced to
Mlle. Gilberte that he had just seen that famous pupil from whom he
expected both glory and fortune.

"But how weak he is still!" he added, "and suffering from his wounds.
I hardly recognized him, he has grown so pale and so thin."

But the girl was listening to him no more. A flood of life filled
her heart. This moment made her forget all her troubles and all
her anguish.

"And I too," thought she, "shall see him again to-day."

And, with the unerring instinct of the woman who loves, she
calculated the moment when Marius would appear in Rue St. Gilles.
It would probably be about nightfall, like the first time, before
leaving; that is, about eight o'clock, for the days just then were
about the longest in the year. Now it so happened, that, on that
very day and hour, Mlle. Gilberte expected to be alone at home.
It was understood that her mother would, after dinner, call on
Mme. Desclavettes, who was in bed, half dead of the fright she had
had during the last convulsions of th