m contact of her son's hand from her
withered one, turned in the direction which she believed to be that of
the hostile country, waving her arms with threatening fury.

"Ah, the assassin! . . . the bandit!"

In her wrathful imagination she was again seeing the countenance so
often displayed in the illustrated pages of the periodicals--moustaches
insolently aggressive, a mouth with the jaw and teeth of a wolf, that
laughed . . . and laughed as men must have laughed in the time of the
cave-men.

AND DON MARCELO ENVIED THIS WRATH!

CHAPTER II

NEW LIFE

When Marguerite was able to return to the studio in the rue de la Pompe,
Julio, who had been living in a perpetual bad humor, seeing everything
in the blackest colors, suddenly felt a return of his old optimism.

The war was not going to be so cruel as they all had at first imagined.
The days had passed by, and the movements of the troops were beginning
to be less noticeable. As the number of men diminished in the streets,
the feminine population seemed to have increased. Although there was
great scarcity of money, the banks still remaining closed, the necessity
for it was increasingly great, in order to secure provisions. Memories
of the famine of the siege of '70 tormented the imagination. Since war
had broken out with the same enemy, it seemed but logical to everybody
to expect a repetition of the same happenings. The storehouses were
besieged by women who were securing stale food at exorbitant prices
in order to store it in their homes. Future hunger was producing more
terror than immediate dangers.

For young Desnoyers these were about all the transformations that war
was creating around him. People would finally become accustomed to the
new existence. Humanity has a certain reserve force of adaptation which
enables it to mould itself to circumstances and continue existing. He
was hoping to continue his life as though nothing had happened. It was
enough for him that Marguerite should continue faithful to their
past. Together they would see events slipping by them with the cruel
luxuriousness of those who, from an inaccessible height, contemplate a
flood without the slightest risk to themselves.

This selfish attitude had also become habitual to Argensola.

"Let us be neutral," the Bohemian would say. "Neutrality does not
necessarily mean indifference. Let us enjoy the great spectacle, since
nothing like it will ever happen again in our lifetime."

I