"Hush!" said her mother firmly. "Don't think about that. Don't look in there. It'll make you sick if you do. Stay here, tend the fire, watch the baby, and play with Raoul." She outlined this program with decision and hurried back downstairs to go on with the execution of one conceived in the same spirit. If she could only get the pharmacy to look a little as it had when Jules had left it, it seemed to her that Jules would seem less lost to her. She shoveled the incredible quantity of broken glass back through the shop into what had been her garden, hardening herself against a qualm of horror at the closer view of the wreckage there. The two big sycamore trees had been cut down and sawn into lengths to use for fuel in the open fire, the burned-out embers of which lay in a black ring where the arbor had stood. She went back to her work hastily, knowing that if she stopped for an instant to look, she would be lost. At noon she went upstairs, and with the children lunched on potatoes and salt. She was putting the last of the innumerable drawers back in its place, after having tried it in all the other possible places, when a poorly dressed, rough-haired, scrawny little boy came into the shop. Madeleine knew him by sight, the six-year-old grandson of Madame Dulcet, a bedridden, old, poor woman on Poulaine Street. The little boy said that he had come to get those powders for his grandmother's asthma. She hadn't slept any for two nights. As he spoke he wound the string about a top and prepared to spin it, nonchalantly. Looking at his cheerful, dirty little face, Madeleine felt herself a thousand years old, separated for always and always from youth which would never know what she had known. "I don't know anything about your grandmother's asthma powders," she said. The little boy insisted, astonished that a grown person did not know everything. "_He_ always kept them. Grandmère used to send me twice a week to get them. Grandmère will scold me awfully if I don't take them back. She's scolding all the time now, because the Germans took our soup-kettle and our frying-pan. We haven't got anything left to cook with." The memory of her immensely greater losses rose burningly to Madeleine's mind. "They took _all my sheets_!" she cried impulsively,--"every one!" "Oh," said the little boy indifferently, "we never had any sheets, anyhow." This did not seem an important statement to him, apparently; but to Madeleine, her old world shattered, emerging into new horizons, beaten upon by a thousand new impressions, it rang loudly. The Germans, then, had only put her in the situation in which a woman, like herself, had always lived ... and that within a stone's throw of these well-filled linen-closets of hers! There was something strange about that, something which she would like to ponder, if only her head did not ache so terribly. The little boy said, insistently, "_He_ always gave me the powders, right away!"