er room, slowly,
and as if uselessly. There is only the light of her little lamp to
caress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the white
ones, the frosty hairs that she alone touches.

Her door is shut, decisive, banal, dreary.

Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once found
out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which
wrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "Only
I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your
smile to espy."

In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night there
are real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there is
something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than
what we have felt to-day. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange
better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be
of some service.

CHAPTER XX

THE CULT

I have been to the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had found
myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There are
many new faces. The factory has tripled--quadrupled in importance;
quite a town of flimsy buildings has been added to it.

"They've built seven others like it in three months!" says Monsieur
Mielvaque to me, proudly.

The manager is now another young nephew of the Messrs. Gozlan. He was
living in Paris and came back on the day of the general mobilization.
Old Monsieur Gozlan looks after everything.

I have a month to wait. I wait slowly, as everybody does. The houses
in the lower town are peopled by absentees. When you go in they talk
to you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barren
reflections on the war. In my street there are twelve houses where the
people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame
Marcassin. In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps
come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only
on emptiness and silence. There are women who have begun their lives
again in a kind of happy misery. The places near them of the dead or
the living they have filled up.

The main streets have not changed, any more than the squares, except
the one which is encrusted with a collection of huts. The life in them
is as bustling as ever, and of brighter color, and more amusing. Many
young men, rich or influential, are passing their wartime in the
offices of the depot,