“Non.... I know. For a week, for a month.... That is all. You are not fidèle.... You will go away and I shall be sad. I know, but I am lonely.” She kissed him. “But we shall be glad,” she said, wistfully. “We shall have happiness—many little minutes of happiness. I shall pretend that you never go away to leave me solitaire....”
What could he say? He protested and asserted, but she smiled a grave smile of knowledge and of resignation. She knew what she knew. “To-morrow,” she said. “Place de la Concorde. Sept heures.”
“And you love me?”
“Do you not believe?” she asked, sweetly.
“Yes.”
“It is well.... Good night, monsieur. To-morrow.”
She kissed him again and freed herself. In another moment her daintiness had been engulfed in the mysterious blackness. Once more she had vanished into her fairy-land.... Each time he wondered if it could be possible that there should be another visitation.
Kendall, young, inexperienced in serious thought as he was, realized that some sort of crisis in his life had arrived; events impended which were to modify him, which were to affect him and to continue to affect him so long as life should last. He did not know what. He did not realize what had just happened to him and to Andree, and yet he wondered ... wondered. And he loved her; he was sure of it. Just as he was sure she was worthy of his love!
He was exalted, yet he was troubled, perplexed, worried, so he walked. At the Boulevard St.-Germain he turned off to the eastward, crossing the Seine upon the Pont Sully, and swinging to the left on the Quai Henri IV until he reached the Boulevard de la Bastille, and so to the place forever marked in the annals of time as the spot, not where the Bastille had stood, but as the spot where it had been destroyed.... The great column uprose blackly before him. At his left was a Metro station, its entrance surrounded by people, who elbowed and surged, or stood or sat wearily near to that place of subterranean refuge.... For so had the Gothas affected the imagination of the poor of Paris! Their nights were nights of terror, for the Hun in his malignant ingenuity sought to drop his bombs in this quarter of Paris, near the Bastille, in the Faubourg St.-Antoine—St.-Antoine, mother of revolutions! If these people could be terrorized, they might be driven to a fresh revolution, reasoned Berlin.... They were in terror, but there was no fresh revolution.... And so they cowered about the subway entrances, men, women, boys, girls, wailing children in arms, ready to descend into the cold dampness of the tube at the first note of the alerte.
It was the first time Kendall had seen this thing, and it went to his heart. He felt an uprush of rage against the Hun who wrought thus inhumanly, thus without that sportsmanship which has lifted war from its mire of blood and horror and degradation, to paint it with the glamour of chivalry and heroism.... Chivalry was dead, slain by the boche, who made frightful war upon defenseless populations, stark naked, hideous, savage war stripped of glamour and of glory. The Hun pictured war not as a St. Michael clad in shining armor and mounted upon a glorious charger, but as a skeleton from which the decaying flesh had not completely fallen, riding upon a wolf....