"What is the trouble, Rosali?"
"P-p-policeman at the d-d-door s-s-says he m-m-must see you!"
A spick and span agent came into my drawing-room. He took the cigarette offered him, and explained the reason for his visit.
"My chief sent me around to ask madame to help. It is a baby case. We came here because the mother said she got a layette at madame's studio. Her name is Mlle. A——; do you remember her case? If madame could come—"
In a few minutes we were walking up the Rue Delambre to the police station of the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Mlle. A—— had come to me for baby clothes before she went to the hospital. The child's father was at the front. When the mother appealed to him to recognize the child, with the desperate way of a man who is in the trenches facing death, he replied,
"What's the use! How do I know that the child is mine?"
Before going to the hospital the girl begged me to think of something to do. When the baby was born we had him photographed and a copy sent to his father, we wrote, "The baby looks like you as you can see from this photograph. If you tear up the card or throw it away, the next shell will kill you."
At the police station, in the stuffy little room where the plain clothes men sit close to the door leading to the office of the Monsieur le Commissaire, I found Mlle. A—— and her baby.
"O Madame," she cried, "Jean got our card. He was sitting in a little circle with some comrades eating dinner. The mail arrived. His name was called. He rose and walked over to the vaguemestre and, oh, Madame, just then the shell came. It exploded where Jean had been eating his dinner, and all his comrades were killed. He says the baby, pauvre chou, looks like him and saved his life."
The agent came with papers. "Will madame sign here?" Jean was recognizing little Pierrot and was applying for permission to marry the baby's mother.