mind nothing like what is generally thought of as military success; it was only after a while that their importance was recognized, when new misfortunes had touched us elsewhere. Two years of dull, black weariness, of constant apprehension, of bereavement upon bereavement. This year a good many foreigners had invaded the beach. The tennis-courts were occupied by young men from beyond the sea, bringing up the memory of former days; the crowd was enlivened by a profusion of multicolored Japanese lanterns; the sea dashed against the glossy flesh of women who seemed as natural as Aphrodite; automobiles were almost as much in the way as in happier days; and between the rows of tents among the manifold tints of colored stuffs, beside the waves where so many beautiful limbs were disporting themselves, was a race of beings that might have been deemed peculiar, coming, going, or remaining motionless; they were the men who had escaped from the fire. They wore nondescript garments, they lacked one limb or even two, they hobbled, their armpits strained by crutches, or lay at length on the warm sand, smoking, timid of appearance, exchanging remarks hardly comprehensible, keeping silent, too, thinking--of what? This last spectacle alone seemed in Odette's eyes to merit consideration. She had lived the greater part of the time among the wounded, she had also lived in Paris with the social world. "All is over," she would say to herself; "nothing will heal all this; it is mere mummery to ape the life of other days; all that is blotted out; La Villaumer was right when he said: 'Men have suffered too much.'" It was in this very place--there, opposite, at the hotel--that she had become acquainted with Jean. They were pleased with one another at the first glance, carried out of themselves, even. She remembered how mad with love she had been in those garden walks, between those tennis-screens, on that beach, and along that terrace which now she was treading overwhelmed with despair, a despair that she could not name, greater than herself, greater than the broad horizon of the sea, greater than all things. She had forgotten nothing. She recalled all the preludes of marriage, then those first vacations, their dual solitude in the midst of the throng; kisses exchanged on these dunes, along these roadsides, in some charming farm orchard, or on certain evenings before the fairylike spectacle of the phosphorescent sea; she remembered that room in the Hôtel de Normandie where he had left her a few days before the 2d of August! And she recalled to mind the beautiful sky of that day, and the tocsin pealing from all the church-towers of the countryside, and the rolling of the drum, and the young men raising their hats. How many of them were alive to-day? XVIII She had hardly finished luncheon when she heard the jingling of the little bell at the wooden gate of her garden. Mme. de Calouas came in.