orrents, and the quay was absolutely deserted. I was losing my head,
and when I had pulled out a five-franc piece, he whipped up his horse
and drove off, taking my little bag, which luckily only contained two
pocket-handkerchiefs, a bit of cake, and the key of my trunk, which I
had been obliged to leave behind in the train.'

'But you ought to have taken his number,' exclaimed the artist
indignantly. In fact he now remembered having been brushed against by
a passing cab, which had rattled by furiously while he was crossing the
Pont Louis Philippe, amid the downpour of the storm. And he reflected
how improbable truth often was. The story he had conjured up as being
the most simple and logical was utterly stupid beside the natural chain
of life's many combinations.

'You may imagine how I felt under the doorway,' concluded Christine.
'I knew well enough that I was not at Passy, and that I should have to
spend the night there, in this terrible Paris. And there was the thunder
and the lightning--those horrible blue and red flashes, which showed me
things that made me tremble.'

She closed her eyelids once more, she shivered, and the colour left her
cheeks as, in her fancy, she again beheld the tragic city--that line
of quays stretching away in a furnace-like blaze, the deep moat of the
river, with its leaden waters obstructed by huge black masses, lighters
looking like lifeless whales, and bristling with motionless cranes which
stretched forth gallows-like arms. Was that a welcome to Paris?

Again did silence fall. Claude had resumed his drawing. But she became
restless, her arm was getting stiff.

'Just put your elbow a little lower, please,' said Claude. Then, with an
air of concern, as if to excuse his curtness: 'Your parents will be very
uneasy, if they have heard of the accident.'

'I have no parents.'

'What! neither father nor mother? You are all alone in the world?'

'Yes; all alone.'

She was eighteen years old, and had been born in Strasburg, quite by
chance, though, between two changes of garrison, for her father was a
soldier, Captain Hallegrain. Just as she entered upon her twelfth year,
the captain, a Gascon, hailing from Montauban, had died at Clermont,
where he had settled when paralysis of the legs had obliged him to
retire from active service. For nearly five years afterwards, her
mother, a Parisian by birth, had remained in that dull provincial town,
managing as well as she could with her scanty