The first of May being also what is known as “Labor Day,” it was a strange contrast to the unworldliness and other-worldliness of these little _religieuses_ to see the alert military forces now beginning to fill the streets, in anticipation of possible insurrection and danger, of which there was strong menace that year. Gendarmes in groups of six and eight, and sometimes even more, dotted the streets in all directions, and the mounted guard was out in full force. Sonia, looking from her cab window, heard repeated orders given to small groups of citizens to disperse. Even two men were not permitted to stand and talk together, and she was conscious of a certain amusement at seeing two groups of gendarmes combine forces to separate these little knots of two and three. Occasionally there was some resistance, and she saw several arrests made, which frightened her. She felt lonely and unprotected, driving through the streets of Paris with an unknown cabman at that early hour, when there was even a possibility of such a horror as an insurrection of the French lower orders. It came over her with piercing power how Harold would once have felt about her being in such a position, and how strange, how inexplicable, how unnatural, it was that it could be nothing to him now--that, even if he knew it, he would feel bound to accept it passively; for nothing, she was certain, could induce him to exercise the semblance of a right over her. She got out of the cab at her own door, safe in body, but more excited and confused in mind than she had ever been in her life--and perhaps, in this moment, more wretched also. XVI