in her little shawl, head erect,
dry-eyed. Not knowing the way, she walks straight ahead.

The dark, narrow streets of the Marais, where gas-jets twinkle at long
intervals, cross and recross and wind about, and again and again in her
feverish course she goes over the same ground. There is always something
between her and the river. And to think that, at that very hour, almost
in the same quarter, some one else is wandering through the streets,
waiting, watching, desperate! Ah! if they could but meet. Suppose she
should accost that feverish watcher, should ask him to direct her:

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur. How can I get to the Seine?"

He would recognize her at once.

"What! Can it be you, Mam'zelle Zizi? What are you doing out-of-doors at
this time of night?"

"I am going to die, Frantz. You have taken away all my pleasure in
living."

Thereupon he, deeply moved, would seize her, press her to his heart and
carry her away in his arms, saying:

"Oh! no, do not die. I need you to comfort me, to cure all the wounds
the other has inflicted on me."

But that is a mere poet's dream, one of the meetings that life can not
bring about.

Streets, more streets, then a square and a bridge whose lanterns make
another luminous bridge in the black water. Here is the river at last.
The mist of that damp, soft autumn evening causes all of this huge
Paris, entirely strange to her as it is, to appear to her like an
enormous confused mass, which her ignorance of the landmarks magnifies
still more. This is the place where she must die.

Poor little Desiree!

She recalls the country excursion which Frantz had organized for her.
That breath of nature, which she breathed that day for the first time,
falls to her lot again at the moment of her death. "Remember," it seems
to say to her; and she replies mentally, "Oh! yes, I remember."

She remembers only too well. When it arrives at the end of the quay,
which was bedecked as for a holiday, the furtive little shadow pauses at
the steps leading down to the bank.

Almost immediately there are shouts and excitement all along the quay:

"Quick--a boat--grappling-irons!" Boatmen and policemen come running
from all sides. A boat puts off from the shore with a lantern in the
bow.

The flower-women awake, and, when one of them asks with a yawn what is
happening, the woman who keeps the cafe that crouches at the corner of
the bridge answers coolly:

"A woman just jumped into the ri