kill them where they find them! Look!" he added, pointing to
the dead wall across the street; "It's here at last, and Paris is
cleaning house and getting ready for it! This is war, Neeland--war at
last!"

Neeland looked across the street where, under a gas lamp on a rusty
iron bracket, was pasted the order for general mobilisation. And on
the sidewalk at the base of the wall lay a man, face downward, his
dusty shoes crossed under the wide flaring trousers, the greasy
_casquet_ still crowding out his lop ears; his hand clenched beside a
stiletto which lay on the stone flagging beside him.

"An apache," said Sengoun coolly. "That's right, too. It's the way we
do in Russia when we clean house for war----"

His face reddened and lighted joyously.

"Thank God for my thousand lances!" he said, lifting his eyes to the
yellowing sky between the houses in the narrow street. "Thank God!
Thank God!"

Now, across the intersections of streets and alleys beyond where they
stood, policemen and Garde cavalry were shooting into doorways,
basements, and up the sombre, dusky lanes, the dry crack of their
service revolvers re-echoing noisily through the street.

Toward the Boulevard below, a line of police and of cavalrymen
blocked the rue Vilna; and, beyond them, the last of the mob was being
driven from the Cafe des Bulgars, where the first ambulances were
arriving and the police, guarding the ruins, were already looking out
of windows on the upper floors.

A cavalryman came clattering down the rue Vilna, gesticulating and
calling out to Sengoun and Neeland to take their ladies and depart.

"Get us a taxicab--there's a good fellow!" cried Sengoun in high
spirits; and the cavalryman, looking at their dishevelled attire,
laughed and nodded as he rode ahead of them down the rue Vilna.

There were several taxicabs on the Boulevard, their drivers staring up
at the wrecked cafe. As Neeland spoke to the driver of one of the
cabs, Ilse Dumont stepped back beside the silent girl whom she had
locked in the bedroom.

"I gave _you_ a chance," she said under her breath. "What may I expect
from you? Answer me quickly!--What am I to expect?"

The girl seemed dazed:

"N-nothing," she stammered. "The--the horror of that place--the
killing--has sickened me. I--I want to go home----"

"You do not intend to denounce me?"

"No--Oh, God! No!"

"Is that the truth? If you are lying to me it means my death."

The girl gazed at her in horror