We had barely stepped out from the narrow doorway of the restaurant into a tenuous, moon-saturated mist, a low-lying diaphaneity that left the upper air-lanes openly clear, when the sirens were wailing again from every quarter of the city. . . .
"They're coming early to-night!" I exclaimed. "Well, that ends all hope for a taxi home! We must find an abri."
"Nonsense! We'll walk quietly back along the river. Unless"—she teased me—"you really are afraid, Ambo?"
I tucked her arm firmly into mine. "So you won't stumble, Mlle. la Réformée!"
"But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your two good legs, M. le Capitaine."
We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts, and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty yards or so they stopped in their tracks, as by a common impulsion, and were momentarily lost to time in a passionate embrace.
Neither Susan nor I spoke of these lovers, who turned aside to pass under the black arches of the Institute, into the Rue de Seine. . . .
As we neared the Pont du Carrousel the barrage began, at first distant and muffled—the outer guns; then suddenly and grimly nearer. An incessant twinkle of tiny star-white points—the bursts of high-explosive shells—drifted toward us from the north. So light was the mist, it did not obscure them; it barely dimmed the moon.
"Hold on!" I said, checking Susan; "this is something new! They're firing to-night straight across Paris." The glitter of star-points seemed in a moment to fill all the northern sky; the noise of the barrage trebled, trebled again.
"Why, it's drum fire!" cried Susan. "Oh, how beautiful!"