re, and when we had found it, we went to bed."

He thought there was some truth in what she said. He would think about
it when alone.

"I regret sometimes that I did not remain in the army. I know what you
are going to say--one becomes a brute in that profession. Doubtless, but
one knows exactly what one has to do, and that is a great deal in life.
I think that my uncle's life is very beautiful and very agreeable.
But now that everybody is in the army, there are neither officers nor
soldiers. It all looks like a railway station on Sunday. My uncle
knew personally all the officers and all 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 t