“Oh, my dear,” exclaimed Gilberte, “I assure you there is not the slightest reason for your feeling so.  My husband is so prudent that he would have been home long ago had there been any danger.  Until you see him back here you may rest easy, take my word for it.”

Henriette was struck by the justness of the argument; Delaherche, it was true, was distinctly not a man to expose himself uselessly.  She was reassured, and went and drew the curtains and threw back the blinds; the tawny light from without, where the sun was beginning to pierce the fog with his golden javelins, streamed in a bright flood into the apartment.  One of the windows was part way open, and in the soft air of the spacious bedroom, but now so close and stuffy, the two women could hear the sound of the guns.  Gilberte, half recumbent, her elbow resting on the pillow, gazed out upon the sky with her lustrous, vacant eyes.

“So, then, they are fighting,” she murmured.  Her chemise had slipped downward, exposing a rosy, rounded shoulder, half hidden beneath the wandering raven tresses, and her person exhaled a subtle, penetrating odor, the odor of love.  “They are fighting, so early in the morning, mon Dieu! It would be ridiculous if it were not for the horror of it.”

But Henriette, in looking about the room, had caught sight of a pair of gauntlets, the gloves of a man, lying forgotten on a small table, and she started perceptibly.  Gilberte blushed deeply, and extending her arms with a conscious, caressing movement, drew her friend to her and rested her head upon her bosom.

“Yes,” she almost whispered, “I saw that you noticed it.  Darling, you must not judge me too severely.  He is an old friend; I told you all about it at Charleville, long ago, you remember.”  Her voice sank lower still; there was something that sounded very like a laugh of satisfaction in her tender tones.  “He pleaded so with me yesterday that I would see him just once more.  Just think, this morning he is in action; he may be dead by this.  How could I refuse him?” It was all so heroic and so charming, the contrast was so delicious between war’s stern reality and tender sentiment; thoughtless as a linnet, she smiled again, notwithstanding her confusion.  Never could she have found it in her heart to drive him from her door, when circumstances all were propitious for the interview.  “Do you condemn me?”

Henriette had listened to her confidences with a very grave face.  Such things surprised her, for she could not understand them; it must be that she was constituted differently from other women.  Her heart that morning was with her husband, her brother, down there where the battle was raging.  How was it possible that anyone could sleep so peacefully and be so gay and cheerful when the loved ones were in peril?

“But think of your husband, my dear, and of that poor young man as well.  Does not your heart yearn to be with them?  You do not reflect that their lifeless forms may be brought in and laid before your eyes at any moment.”