Nor could she again go in the evening, at nightfall, to the edge of the sea, where in each vague shadow she would have thought she saw the shadow of Jean. They used to love to wander there in the warm obscurity of August. The long-drawn moan of the sea was to them a cradle-song composed by a musician of genius. No doubt Odette used to see in those days fewer large waves than to-day; but in those days all things blended with her love and seemed marvellous to her. Sometimes Jean, who had his boyish ways, would amuse himself by leaving her, suddenly disappearing from her eyes in the darkness. She would call him in an anxious voice, "Jean!" And she would always recognize his shadow as he drew near by his extending his arms in the form of a cross, and throwing them around her, to press her to him the moment he met her. In those days they would hear afar off the music of the violins, and would see above the dune the dark villas and the illuminated hotels. Now she knew that in those hotels were lying a thousand men swathed in bandages, poisoned by pus and gangrene, and the sea was holding up a long chaplet of buoys from which were hanging nets to ward off submarines. How could she go back there? The summer wore away in a manner almost satisfactory, and with great hopes in the military operations. A wave of optimism passed over the country. Rumanian colors were floated from the town-hall; the battle of the Somme had freed Verdun and was itself beginning to slacken. In the beginning of October the wounded in the hospital were almost few. Odette, with too little to do, reduced to solitude, began to droop. She found the conversation of Mme. de Calouas very fine, but it did not touch her. Why not? She would have her lay aside her mourning--the two years being now a long month over past. Other widows had almost joyfully put off their crape in the late summer heat. Odette considered it a profanation. "Time was passing." No doubt it was. It was long--without measure long. But to her Jean had died yesterday, nothing in her feelings had been changed by what she had seen. She thought of all those bodily wounds which she had dressed with her own hands, and which had healed. The great wound within herself remained open. At times she would forget the war, the sorrows of which at other times would crush her, and think only of the beloved being to whom she was bound for eternity.