"I can only think of what they have done to us," said the old man. "It does not seem as if there was anything left for us to do to them. Vengeance which does not give the Avenger pleasure is a poor sort of vengeance. Madame Simon..." The old woman in question turned a pair of sheeny eyes towards the speaker. "Would it give you any particular pleasure to cut the breasts off an old German woman?" With a trembling hand Madame Simon flattened the bosom of her dress to show that there was nothing beneath. "It would give me no pleasure," she said, "but I shall show my scars to the President." "An eye for an eye--a tooth for a tooth," said the old man. "That is the ancient law. But it does not work. There is no justice in exchanging a German eye and a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had been caught was what tortured him. And so I think it will be with the Germans when they find that they have failed. They have built up their power on the absurd hypothesis that they are men. Their punishment will be in discovering that they never were anything but low animals and never could be." "That is too deep for me," said the other man. "They tied my daughter to her bed, and afterward they set fire to her mattress." "I wish," said Jeanne Bergère, "that they had set fire to my mattress." A violent concussion shook the cellar to its foundations. Even the face of the thirsty little boy brightened. "It is one of ours," he said. "To eradicate the lice which feed upon the Germans and the foul smells which emanate from their bodies there is nothing so effective as high explosives," said the old man. He looked at his watch and said: "We have half an hour more." At the end of that time, he climbed the cellar stair, pushed open the door, and looked out. Partly in the bright sunlight and partly in the deep shadows, he resembled a painting by Rembrandt. "I see no one," he said. "There is a lot of smoke." His eyes became suddenly wide open, fixed, round with a kind of celestial astonishment. This his old French heart stopped beating, and he fell to the foot of the stair. His companions thought that he must have been shot. They dared not move. But it was no bullet or fragment of far-blown shell that had laid the old man low. He had seen in the smoke that whirled down the village street, a little soldier in the uniform of France. Pure unadulterated joy had struck him dead.