Elodie received him with open arms. She was impressed by the martial bearing of her ramrod of a man, and she proudly fingered the three stripes on his sleeve and the D.C.M. ribbon on his breast. She took him for walks, she who, in her later supineness, hated to put one foot before the other--by the Grands Boulevards, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysées, hanging on his arm, with a recrudescence of the defiant air of the Marseilles _gamine._ She made valiant efforts to please her hero who had bled in great battles and had returned to fight in great battles again. She had a thousand things to tell him of her life in Paris, to which the man, weary of the mud and blood of war, listened as though they were revelations of Paradise. Yet, she had but existed idly day in and day out, in the eternal wrapper and slippers, with her cage of birds. The little beasts kept her alive--it was true. One was dull in Paris without men. And the women of her acquaintance, mostly professional, were in poverty. They had the same cry, "My dear, lend me ten francs." "My little Elodie, I am on the rocks, my man is killed." _"Ma bien aimée,_ I am starving. You who are at ease, let me come and eat with you"--and so on and so on. Her heart grieved for them; but _que veux-tu?_--one was not a charitable institution. So it was all very sad and heartrending. To say nothing of her hourly anxiety. If only the _sale guerre_ would cease and they could go on tour again! Ah, those happy days! "Were they, after all, so very happy?" asked Andrew. "One was contented, free from care." "But now?" "May they not come to tell me at any minute that you are killed?" "That's true," said Andrew gravely. "And besides--" She paused. "Besides, what?" "I love you more now," replied Elodie. Which gave Andrew food for thought, whenever he had time at the front to consider the appetite. When next he had a short leave it was as a Lieutenant; but Elodie had gone to Marseilles, braving the tedious third-class journey, to attend her mother's funeral. There Madame Figasso having died intestate, she battled with authorities and lawyers and the _huissier_ Boudin who professed heartbreak at her unfilial insistence on claiming her little inheritance. With the energy which she always displayed in the serious things of life she routed them all. She sold the furniture, the dressmaking business, wrested the greasy bag of savings from the hands of a felonious and discomfited Boudin, and returned to Paris with some few thousand francs in her pocket. Horatio Bakkus, meanwhile, had moved into the Saint-Denis flat to take care of the birds. Nobody in France craving the services of a light tenor, he would have starved, had not his detested brother the Archdeacon, a rich man, made him a small allowance. It was a sad day for him when, after a couple of months' snug lying, he had to betake himself to his attic under the roof, where he shivered in the coalless city.