re the signs which enabled him
to reconstruct the person somewhat disfigured by the severe uniform.
Her face was pale and sad. There wasn't a trace left in it of the old
vanities that used to give it its childish, doll-like beauty. In the
depths of those great, dark-circled eyes life seemed to be reflected in
new forms. . . . Marguerite!

They stared at one another for a long while, as though hypnotized with
surprise. She looked alarmed when Desnoyers advanced a step toward her.
No . . . No! Her eyes, her hands, her entire body seemed to protest, to
repel his approach, to hold him motionless. Fear that he might come near
her, made her go toward him. She said a few words to the soldier who
remained on the bench, receiving across the bandage on his face a ray of
sunlight which he did not appear to feel. Then she rose, going to meet
Julio, and continued forward, indicating by a gesture that they must
find some place further on where the wounded man could not hear them.

She led the way to a side path from which she could see the blind man
confided to her care. They stood motionless, face to face. Desnoyers
wished to say many things; many . . . but he hesitated, not knowing how
to frame his complaints, his pleadings, his endearments. Far above all
these thoughts towered one, fatal, dominant and wrathful.

"Who is that man?"

The spiteful accent, the harsh voice with which he said these words
surprised him as though they came from someone else's mouth.

The nurse looked at him with her great limpid eyes, eyes that seemed
forever freed from contractions of surprise or fear. Her response
slipped from her with equal directness.

"It is Laurier. . . . It is my husband."

Laurier! . . . Julio looked doubtfully and for a long time at the
soldier before he could be convinced. That blind officer motionless
on the bench, that figure of heroic grief, was Laurier! . . . At first
glance, he appeared prematurely old with roughened and bronzed skin
so furrowed with lines that they converged like rays around all the
openings of his face. His hair was beginning to whiten on the temples
and in the beard which covered his cheeks. He had lived twenty years
in that one month. . . . At the same time he appeared younger, with a
youthfulness that was radiating an inward vigor, with the strength of a
soul which has suffered the most violent emotions and, firm and serene
in the satisfaction of duty fulfilled, can no longer know fear.

As De