The little de Blauves were not yet in black. The eldest wept a little when Odette kissed her with flowing tears--for Odette was thinking of her own grief--but the little girls were not at all prostrated, and there was even something radiant in their expression. "What is it all about, dear children?" asked Odette. Then they clapped their hands and said that their brother had just landed from his island and was up-stairs washing himself, and that he had received his mother's permission to enlist. "To enlist!" exclaimed Odette. "Why, how old is he, the poor little fellow?" "He is almost seventeen," said the eldest girl. "Papa is dead, he must replace him." "And what does the big brother say to that?" "Oh, he is delighted. He had begged to enlist as soon as mobilization was declared, but papa would not consent; he said: 'You will go with your class, when the time comes; it will not be long.'" The big brother appeared, coming down-stairs. He was a fine boy, delicate, surprisingly like his mother's portrait, painted in her youth, which hung above the great sofa. He rushed past like a bomb, exclaiming: "I must hurry to the recruiting-office!" No more was said about the dead father, and yet Odette knew that he was adored by all his family. Only to the governess, a confidential person well on in years, did Odette say a word about the event. "It is a great honor," said the governess. "Do they know how he was killed?" "A bomb, which at the same time killed seventeen men who were near him." It was fearlessly said in the presence of the children. Not one of the little ones showed the least emotion, while Odette shuddered through her whole body. She asked after the mother. "Mama writes that the mortars send a regular hail; she is almost deafened with them. The noise disturbs her in her work. They jump, at times, as over a skipping-rope, she writes.... She has also some Boches to wait upon her; did you know?" And that was all. Odette looked at the dead man's portrait, opposite that of the Red Cross nurse, who was jumping, at this moment, at the sound of the marmites, and had just sent her young son to the firing-line, casting at least one more de Blauve into the furnace that had consumed his father. Monsieur de Blauve had not been painted in uniform; he showed only the good face of a clever and kindly man. It must have been in all tranquillity, without uttering a single grand word, that he had prepared his whole family for the eventualities of war; and his children, to the last one, were as ready to die as to go on a walk, or to church. IV