Crossing the Champs-Elysées on her homeward way, Odette met two groups of blinded soldiers, each one led by a woman who helped him to pass from refuge to refuge. A blinded soldier invariably caused Odette to shudder with dismay. Of all the wounded by the war, such as he most painfully touched her sympathies. She stood on the first refuge as if petrified, gazing at these men led by the hand by young women, a third clinging to his comrade's coat, groping in the air with a timid arm. In the face of distress like this, coachmen and chauffeurs, however much in haste, stopped short as before a funeral procession, which all Paris respects. The double stream of circulation was arrested in both directions recalling pictures of the waters of the Red Sea. The crowded foot-passengers formed a rampart with their bodies. No one saluted, for that is not the custom, but the seriousness of all faces spoke of the impulse, almost the need, thus to act. Veneration, such as has never before been seen on French faces, was stamped upon the features of men and women, even of children. That which was taking place was almost nothing, simply a group of soldiers whose organs of sight had been destroyed, with charitable women serving them as guides. For two minutes they interrupted the movement of the Champs-Elysées. Yet it was a moral influence, an unrecognized, unclassified power, poor and even lamentable of aspect, which had suddenly arrested the prosperous physical movement of a great city. Odette felt her heart throb; her eyes were so blurred that as she reached the sidewalk she almost failed to recognize her friend La Villaumer, who was standing there, gazing at that simple, pathetic transit. After the first greeting he said to Odette: "I have often imagined Jesus returning among us; I thought just now that I saw him at the head of that group, motioning with his gentle hand to the crowd of busy mortals, 'Pause, travellers!' He had come back as the God of justice and of love, just when the demon was making his most determined attack upon his beloved, just when each one of us is obliged to look into the inmost recesses of his heart and ask himself: 'What is going to be left?' And he was replying to us, 'Verily, I say unto you, henceforth cherish, all of you, a concern for human distress.' I thought, too, that I heard him whisper--pardon the blasphemy if it shocks you!--I heard him whisper softly: 'My sufferings have been surpassed; the sufferings of my martyrs have been surpassed.'" "Oh!"