She made him no answer this time, as if all her being, all her faculties were concentrated on contemplating the great calamity of their defeat.  She was of another age; she was a survivor of that strong old race of frontier burghers who defended their towns so valiantly in the good days gone by.  The clean-cut lines of her stern, set face, with its fleshless, uncompromising nose and thin lips, which the brilliant light of the lamp brought out in high relief against the darkness of the room, told the full extent of her stifled rage and grief and the wound sustained by her antique patriotism, the revolt of which refused even to let her sleep.

About that time Delaherche became conscious of a sensation of isolation, accompanied by a most uncomfortable feeling of physical distress.  His hunger was asserting itself again, a griping, intolerable hunger, and he persuaded himself that it was debility alone that was thus robbing him of courage and resolution.  He tiptoed softly from the room and, with his candle, again made his way down to the kitchen, but the spectacle he witnessed there was even still more cheerless; the range cold and fireless, the closets empty, the floor strewn with a disorderly litter of towels, napkins, dish-clouts and women’s aprons; as if the hurricane of disaster had swept through that place as well, bearing away on its wings all the charm and cheer that appertain naturally to the things we eat and drink.  At first he thought he was not going to discover so much as a crust, what was left over of the bread having all found its way to the ambulance in the form of soup.  At last, however, in the dark corner of a cupboard he came across the remainder of the beans from yesterday’s dinner, where they had been forgotten, and ate them.  He accomplished his luxurious repast without the formality of sitting down, without the accompaniment of salt and butter, for which he did not care to trouble himself to ascend to the floor above, desirous only to get away as speedily as possible from that dismal kitchen, where the blinking, smoking little lamp perfumed the air with fumes of petroleum.

It was not much more than ten o’clock, and Delaherche had no other occupation than to speculate on the various probabilities connected with the signing of the capitulation.  A persistent apprehension haunted him; a dread lest the conflict might be renewed, and the horrible thought of what the consequences must be in such an event, of which he could not speak, but which rested on his bosom like an incubus.  When he had reascended to his study, where he found Maurice and Jean in exactly the same position he had left them in, it was all in vain that he settled himself comfortably in his favorite easy-chair; sleep would not come to him; just as he was on the point of losing himself the crash of a shell would arouse him with a great start.  It was the frightful cannonade of the day, the echoes of which were still ringing in his ears; and he would