t the Triumphal Arch and
before the portals of Notre Dame; spies were hunted out, proclamations
issued, the entrance ways to deep cellars were placarded; and Night,
that long-exiled princess, came back to us, royally, in full mourning
robes. In her honor all windows were doubly curtained, all street lamps
extinguished, or dimmed with paint to a heavy blue. We invoked the
august amplitude of darkness and would gladly have banished the trivial
prying moon, seeing her at last in true colors for the sinister corpse
light of heaven which she is. No one, I think, was deceived by this
lengthening interval of calm. Why the Gothas did not at once return,
what restrained them from following up their easy triumph, we could not
guess; but we knew they would come again, would come many times....

Meanwhile, for most of us who dwelt there, life went on as before,
busily enough; but for one of us--as for how many another--this no
longer mattered.

Brave little Jeanne-Marie Valerie Josephine Aulard, on that night of
anguish, died in giving premature birth to Jimmy's son, James Aulard
Kane--as Susan later named him: for this wizened, unready morsel of
man's flesh, in spite of every disadvantage attending his debut and
first motherless weeks on earth, clung with the characteristic tenacity
of his parents to his one obvious line of duty, which was merely to keep
alive in despite of fortune: a duty he somehow finally accomplished to
his own entire satisfaction and to the blessed relief of Susan and of
me. But I shall never forget my first pitiful introduction to James
Aulard Kane.

After leaving Dalton, that night, I had finally made my way to Susan's
hospital on foot, which I had soon found to be the one practicable means
of locomotion. It was a long walk, and it brought me in due course into
the Avenue de la Grande Armee, just in time to receive the full
stampeding effect of the three bombs which fell there, the nearest of
them not four hundred yards distant from me. I am by no means
instinctively intrepid; quite the contrary; I shy like a skittish horse
in the presence of danger, and my first authentic impulse is always to
cut and run. On this occasion, by the time I had mastered this impulse,
I had placed a good six hundred yards between me and that ill-fated
building, whose stone-faced upper floors had been riven and hurled down
to the broad avenue below. Then, shamefacedly enough, I turned and
forced myself back toward that smokin