f
they beaded you on the way back you wouldn't care."

In the sky an escadrille of French planes had appeared and the three
German specks had vanished, followed by a trail of little puffs of
shrapnel. The indigo dome of the afternoon sky was full of a distant
snoring of motors.

The train screamed outside the station and the permissionaires ran for
the platform, their packed musettes bouncing at their hips.

* * * * *

The dark boulevards, with here and there a blue lamp lighting up a bench
and a few tree-trunks, or a faint glow from inside a closed cafe where a
boy in shirt-sleeves is sweeping the floor. Crowds of soldiers,
Belgians, Americans, Canadians, civilians with canes and straw hats and
well-dressed women on their arms, shop-girls in twos and threes laughing
with shrill, merry voices; and everywhere girls of the street, giggling
alluringly in hoarse, dissipated tones, clutching the arms of drunken
soldiers, tilting themselves temptingly in men's way as they walk along.
Cigarettes and cigars make spots of reddish light, and now and then a
match lighted makes a man's face stand out in yellow relief and glints
red in the eyes of people round about.

Drunk with their freedom, with the jangle of voices, with the rustle of
trees in the faint light, with the scents of women's hair and cheap
perfumes, Howe and Randolph stroll along slowly, down one side to the
shadowy columns of the Madeleine, where a few flower-women still offer
roses, scenting the darkness, then back again past the Opera towards the
Porte St. Martin, lingering to look in the offered faces of women, to
listen to snatches of talk, to chatter laughingly with girls who squeeze
their arms with impatience.

"I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see the
dust fly, Howe, old man."

* * * * *

The hors d'oeuvre came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips of
herrings and silver anchovies, salads where green peas and bits of
carrot lurked under golden layers of sauce, sliced tomatoes, potato
salad green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled eggs barely visible under
thickness of vermilion-tinged dressing, olives, radishes, discs of
sausage of many different forms and colours, complicated bundles of
spiced salt fish, and, forming the apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of pate
de foie gras. Howe poured out pale-coloured Chablis.

"I used to think that down home was the on