r advantage and so refusing his good fortune--or trying
to; and practical Jeanne-Marie simply nonplussed by his sudden lack of
all common sense! Besides which, wasn't marriage a sacrament, and wasn't
M'sieu Jee-mee a good Catholic? Was he going back on his faith--or
asking her to trifle with hers? And, anyway, they were married--that was
the end of it! And of course, Ambo, it was--really. There! I knew sooner
or later you'd have to smile!"

"Did he give in gracefully?" I asked.

"Oh, things soon settled themselves, I imagine, when Jeanne-Marie was
well enough to leave. Naturally, she had to as soon as she could. A
soldier's wife can't live with him at the Front, you know--even to keep
house for his _esquadrille_. She's living here now, in Paris, with a
distant cousin, an old lady who runs a tiny shop near St.-Sulpice--sells
pious pamphlets and pink-and-blue plaster Virgins--you know the sort of
thing, Ambo. You must call on her at once in due form, dear. You must.
I'm so eager to--when I can." She paused on a breath, then added slowly,
her eyes closing, "The baby's expected in February--Jimmy's baby."

The look on her face had puzzled me as I left her; a look of quiet
happiness, I must have said--if I had not known.

And my vision at Evian----?

I walked back toward the barrier down endless darkening avenues of
suburban Neuilly; walked by instinct, though quite unconscious of
direction, straight to the Porte Maillot, through the emotional
nightmare of what my old childhood nurse, Maggie, used always to call "a
great state of mind."

V

And that night--it was, I think, the thirtieth of January, or was it the
thirty-first?--fifty or sixty Boche aeroplanes came by detached
squadrons over Paris and, for the first time since the Zeppelins of
1916, dropped a shower of bombs on the _agglomeration Parisienne_. It
was an entirely successful raid, destructive of property and life; for
the German flyers in their powerful Gothas had caught Paris napping,
impotently unprepared.

I had dined that evening with an old acquaintance, doing six-months'
time, as it amused him to put it, with the purchasing department of the
Red Cross; a man who had long since turned the silver spoon he was born
with to solid gold, and who could see no reason why, just because for
the first time in his life he was giving something for nothing, he
should deprive himself while doing so of the very high degree of
creature comfort he had always enjo