But when Juliette wrote to him from Paris and told him how happy she was with her lover, the gipsy in Bassompierre drove out the bourgeois, and he sent his daughter her mother's jewelry and the golden shawl; but he kept the daguerreotype, for, after all, Juliette was not really his daughter and Adèle had really been his wife. Three years passed. Juliette lived in a little house at Belleville with two baby girls called Elène and Henriette. When in after years she looked back to this time it seemed to her smothered in roses, the roses of an operatic scene. Everything, indeed, in retrospect was like that--the arrival of her lover in his gay uniform, the embowered kisses, the lights of Paris far below, the suppers on the veranda, the warm Sunday mornings, the two babies asleep on the lawn and their father watching them, herself before a glass and her lover's face seen over her shoulder, the sudden sharp embrace; all were heavy with the intolerable sense of a curtain that must fall. Then came the war; there was a hurried move down to stuffy apartments in Paris; ready money hastily got together by the young officer, who spoke confidently of the large sum it was, since, after all, the war would be over in a month and the Prussians have had their lesson; and at last a breathless kiss. The crowds surged cheering through the streets, the two babies screamed disapproval of their new surroundings, and Juliette's lover was killed in the first battle; he had only time to scribble a few trembling lines: _Mon adorée, je t'ai flanqué un mauvais coup. Pardonnez-moi. Mes dernières pensées sont pour toi. Adieu. Deux gros bécots aux bébés. J'ai parlé pour toi à mon père. Cherche argent--je t'embrasse follement follem---- _ Yet when she received this letter, some impulse kept her from going to her lover's father. She could not bear the possibility of being made to realize that those debonair years of love were regarded by him as an intrigue to be solved by money. If André's mother had been alive, she might have felt differently; now she would not trouble a stricken family that might regard her tears as false; she would not even try to return to her own father. No doubt he would welcome her; but pride, all the strange and terrible pride that was henceforth to haunt Juliette's soul, forbade her.